My hunch is that in each age, or each culture, or each value system, there is a similarly-elevated human activity regarded as the sine qua non of existence. Each of these ergo sums (if I can call them that) encapsulates what we think to be most important, most constitutive of our human identity. The lack of this quality will result in significant anxiety, the sense that one is not fully participating in whatever it means to be human. Descartes’ anxious doubting was assuaged by the act of philosophical reasoning, which proved to him that he was real. For someone alive during, and participating in, the Romantic movement, the anxiety would have centred instead around the amount and depth of authentic emotion; the ergo sum of that period would have been “I feel, therefore I am.” This is how you know you are really human: you exist in a state of transcendent passion! I’ve always found it interesting to consider: what is the " X ergo sum" of any particular time or place?

A year or two ago, for a variety of personal reasons irrelevant to this little essay, I somewhat intentionally decided to reengage with social media. I scrolled through my Facebook feed again for the first time (after declaring my relationship with it “complicated” some 10 years prior). But mostly I started to follow friends and post on Facebook’s more glamorous younger sibling, Instagram. There are many, many reflections I could write about the state of social media as I found it, and upon my own emotional and psychological state as I engaged with the apps. Many of the various downsides of social media are now fairly well-recognized, and don’t require my reiteration. But one feeling I noticed kept coming up again and again: an anxious need to establish myself as present by posting something, anything. I’m here, I exist, I matter! It struck me that we may have here the evidence of a new ergo sum: Communico, ergo sum. “I share, therefore I am.”

From my own self-reflection and observations of others’ behaviour on the platforms, it does seem there is now a heightened urgency around the sharing of experiences over against the mere having of them. It is not enough to go on vacation; it must be live-blogged! It is not enough to eat at a fun restaurant with friends; the friends must be tagged! It is not enough to have a funny thought in one’s own head; it must be refined with the choicest of memes and emoji and shared. And so on. Of course, sharing our experiences with one another is not a strange or pathological behaviour. On the contrary, it is an integral part of human relationship. On a deep psychological and emotional level, we need others to know our feelings and thoughts about the things in our shared reality, and we likewise need to empathize with the experience of others. What’s new seems to be the degree to which the act of sharing itself has superseded the reality of the thing or experience shared. Enjoying an experience with those present (even if that is just myself) is replaced by the need to immediately translate that experience into the realm of social feedback. I suspect that this means there is some kind of core anxiety of identity at play here. Am I even a person if I am not establishing my presence in these various online places with content of the kind that will cause people to see me how I want to be seen?

I would have thought that identity anxieties would be about the lack of attaining a situation prized by the surrounding culture (however locally or globally defined). In ancient Greece, maybe you’d feel some identity anxiety if you were a foreigner, or someone who couldn’t participate in the civic or martial affairs of the day, for whatever reason. In mid-2000s Silicon Valley, maybe you’d feel similarly if you weren’t building a “disruptive” startup. There are a no doubt a large number of “identities” that have been seen as of paramount value over the years: warrior, scholar, saint, parent, entrepreneur, scientist, evangelist, libertine, empath, sex icon, guru, artist, athlete, etc… But nowadays, perhaps as a consequence of society having approximated the liberal ideal of freedom of self-determination, it seems that more important than actually attaining any of these identities is the establishment of the identity via social media. And so what becomes common in our age is not a particular identity per se (because we each choose our own from a wide and even conflicting array of options), but a kind of meta-identity or modus operandi of identity establishment. We are defined, not so much by who we “are” in some kind of essential or internal way, and more by the space we carve out for ourselves via the act of sharing. The result is that “sharing” transitions from being a basic human social practice (the kind typically found among close relations and which facilitates the establishment of empathic bonds), to being a much more consequential (and therefore anxiety-ridden) social practice of establishing one’s chosen identity (qua identity) in the most highly-trafficked sphere of human society today: social media.

So far this is just a hypothesis I’m developing from observations of cultural change over the last few decades. I don’t claim to have proved it. I also feel the need to pause and anticipate a few of the possible reactions to the hypothesis so far:

1. I’m not trying to claim that this way of using social media (what we might call “sharing as identity establishment”) is the only one; clearly you could point to any number of examples of posts that don’t fit this description. In fact, probably very few people do only this on social media.
2. I would acknowledge that “sharing as identity establishment” happens in many human contexts, on and offline—not just on social media. This whole thought experiment is dealing with the question of identity anxiety, and as I’ve already indicated this is not a new question. What does seem new to me is the extent to which this “sharing at one another” has become a dominant mode of discourse (well, a dual monologue, as it were). As such, this mode of engaging with social media is by no means “abnormal”, and is probably hardly even worth comment anymore; that’s exactly the point! The fact that it doesn’t seem to register that we are doing something different, or more, with “sharing” than we used to, is precisely what has me intrigued.
3. The fact that many of us choose not to share at all on social media does not run counter to the hypothesis. It is not surprising that, faced with the huge amount of effort required to establish one’s identity online, many people would decide not to play the game. This doesn’t mean the game isn’t the dominant one, though, in just the same way that in a wealth-driven society some people might resign themselves to being poor because they don’t feel that there is any opportunity for change in their circumstances. The identity anxiety persists, and has simply been capitulated to completely.

So, if any of the hypothesis is at all right, how did we wind up here? First and foremost I see the current situation as an unintended consequence of the design of social media. As companies like Facebook/Meta have unabashedly pushed forward the concept of “connection” (whatever they mean by it; it’s certainly been twisted beyond all recognition into something like sheer access to personal information), we are essentially force-fed a never-ending stream of posts from people at varying degrees of separation from us. When these feeds are sprinkled liberally with advertisement we are left feeling even more overwhelmed. There is the sense that to be heard amidst the clamour we must shout (share) all the louder and all the more. And so a vicious cycle develops: to be “seen” by our peers we must engage in the rigorous process of identity establishment by sharing enough to be noticed. But this increases the amount of information in the feeds, making individual posts (which we may regard on the hypothesis as bids for identity establishment) less likely to be seen. And so we must shout even louder.

If you agree with any of this, or that it’s at all a problem, what is there to do about it? I think there are two levels on which we can give some suggestions. Practically, we can recognize that social media is an imperfect and distorted model of healthy social structures. It’s not “normal” (in the history of humanity, anyway), or necessary, to passively keep in touch with hundreds or thousands of people. It’s not “normal” to be constantly bombarded by personal news and announcements of varying degrees of significance from people at varying degrees of intimacy. I think it’s possible to choose smaller and more intentional spaces in which to engage in the act of sharing, which are less likely to encourage a distortion of that sharing in the direction of anxious identity establishment. I think it’s even possible to use digital tools for this purpose (groups of friends and families can maintain their own ad hoc social media networks via chat apps, for example, in ways that more closely mirror real-world relationship structures). Choosing smaller venues does mean intentionally foregoing the “reach” that our sharing might have. I see this as a choice to trade the “quantity” of reaction (likes, comments, etc…) for the “quality” of interaction (dialogue with people you actually independently know and care about). None of this is to discount the various benefits that social media apps provide, but merely to point out that in their current design they are perhaps pressing the normal human sharing impulse into a service for which it was never meant.

On a deeper level, I think we have to face the classic existential questions (what I’ve called “identity anxiety” or “anxiety of existence” here) without flinching. It’s certainly true that being an “influencer” (at least the kind which I most often see online) is a vacuous kind of identity, utterly precarious in its situation. But it’s also true that other, more traditional, identities are equally precarious, if only in the limit and less obviously so. Hooking your existential cart up to the horse of motherhood, for example, might be more wholesome (not to mention more valuable to the community), but at the end of the day it’s not going to leave you free of anxiety (what if you cannot have children? What do you do when they leave the house? Etc…) Philosophically, I tend to agree with the teacher in Ecclesiastes, who declares all such things to be a kind of mist that eventually evaporates. Any kind of ergo sum which depends on our abilities, our productivity, our intelligence, or our fortune in life, is bound to generate anxiety, or to draw lines of value judgment that leave some people out. What if the ultimate value of a person, our “identity”, is not so differentiated and special as we would like to think? What if it just is, established not by a process of existentialist self-determination, but by the words that declared every single part of creation good? This would be an identity which cannot be lost or tarnished. It would be an identity which cannot be denied to any person, no matter their race, gender, nationality, abledness, wealth status, or any other attribute or lack thereof. It would be an identity which could never result in anxiety. And finally, it would be an identity that would never even need to be shared about on social media, because everyone would already possess it equally.

If I believed all of that, which I would like to, then I would probably post a bit less, or at least less self-centredly, on Instagram. If I believed all of that, which I would like to, then I would be asking how to move more concretely from anxious communico (“I share”) to true communio (“community”).

It has therefore been difficult for me to develop a practical framework for engaging with new technologies like ChatGPT. I already have a theoretical framework for understanding new technologies, informed by various thinkers (this is a long list of writers including standouts like Jacques Ellul or Albert Borgmann). This theoretical framework provides a straightforward analysis of AI technologies, just like it does for earlier technologies: the type of AI I have in mind (however it is instantiated, e.g., a model constituted by training data) is a device that reliably makes a certain good (in this case, novel, creative media) more efficiently available. But AI technologies themselves, as a force impacting culture, are already a runaway train. Trying to decide what to do about them is much more difficult than simply understanding what they are (understanding what they are as mere technologies, I mean). To be clear, I’m not attempting to consider whether AI systems can be conscious or actually “intelligent”. That is an extremely difficult and interesting set of philosophical and scientific questions, but what I’m trying to discuss here doesn’t depend on the ontological status of AI agents. (Of course, if it turns out that AI systems are “persons” in some sense, then we have a whole different set of awful and perplexing situations we find ourselves in, such as the ethics of how to treat these AI persons).

All that to say, as a result of my own aforementioned confusion and perplexity, I want to approach this critical discussion of AI not primarily from a theoretical or philosophical perspective, but from my own particular human (which is to say emotional) perspective. I’ll put it as bluntly as I can: the recent developments in AI make me sad, and worried. I understand that in saying these things I am departing from the general sentiment of excitement and possibility that surrounds the AI space, and probably deeply offending some people besides. So I’ll explain further: AI as a set of technical achievements does not make me sad. The ability of ChatGPT 4 (or 5, or 2000) to string together so many words that make so much sense is incredible, and does not itself make me sad. I myself am a technologist and delight in technological achievements, both my own and those of others. I’ve implemented machine learning training algorithms in the past, and understand, in some basic way, how these things work from a technical perspective. I am in total awe of what happens when you throw all the data of the entire Internet into a machine learning model. I would not have expected it to work half so well! But…

My concerns

There are two main reasons I’m sad and worried: first, that AI might create confusion about what is a human being—what is a person—and therefore might lead to confusion about what makes humans valuable, ultimately contributing to the devaluing of actual human persons. Second, I’m worried that, in relying on AI for the production of creative output of whatever kind (writing, music, visual art), we will allow the uniquely human capacity for creativity to atrophy. I view these as likely, if not inevitable, consequences of the current trend in AI development and use. The paradigm of modern technology is bent in the direction of such outcomes, but I do have a hope that, even in small and provisional ways, there will be a reaction to “AI overreach” that will encourage instead a more limited and responsible use of AI in daily life.

I want to focus on these dangers especially, not because there are not other significant dangers associated with AI, but because the other dangers seem to already be getting plenty of airtime: super-intelligent machines taking over the planet, or deepfake videos causing political chaos and division. The things I’m worried about are perhaps “fuzzier” or more “internal” than such dramatic, global outcomes. But precisely for that reason, I think we need to pause and think hard about these “internal” consequences. They threaten our human future in a less obvious and perhaps more long-term way, but they do so nonetheless, and it’s already abundantly clear that our species will happily sell our proverbial inheritance for the technological equivalent of a bowl of stew. Like Esau, we’re so often fixated on present desire and the ability of technology to satisfy it that we rarely think about the deeper value of what we might be giving up along the way. Often, by the time we realize what we’ve lost, culture has reorganized itself around the change, and the loss is not even apparent to new generations. The influx of AI technologies is another milestone along that journey, and therefore another chance for us to stop and think. That is what I am attempting to do now, however narrowly framed by my two worries.

Before diving in, I think it’s also important to qualify my worries as provisional. As with any concerns about the way the future might turn out, I could very well be wrong. Only time will tell. A good amount of empirical evidence would need to accumulate in order to turn my concerns into anything approaching proof. In general, I am apparently much more enamoured of the precautionary principle than the wider technological culture. I think it’s worth considering what could go wrong with technological innovations and working hard to prevent bad outcomes, even if such outcomes are not a logically necessary consequence of those innovations. I fully expect that some reading this will not feel as worried as I do, either in the sense of thinking the bad outcomes are less likely than I do, or in the sense of not agreeing that the outcomes are bad to begin with. Fair enough–those are precisely the debates which need to happen in a more rigorous way as AI technologies continue to develop. For now, I am mostly trying to call our attention to these worries so that the categories for debate still exist by the time any further debate is moot.

Confusing the concept of “person”

Let’s consider first the worry that heavy AI use might cause confusion about what constitutes human persons, and how we relate to them. One aspect of the new chat-based LLMs which is already clearly apparent is that users interact with them as communicative agents. They are explicitly designed in this way, as a natural human language interface for generating text or other media (just recall how even when qualifying its responses as that of an AI language model, ChatGPT continues to use the first person singular pronoun “I”!). I wager that we’ve all observed the very strange phenomenon in which human users, ostensibly being completely aware that they are not actually talking to another person, begin to act as though they are. In fact, these AI tools often seem to produce better artifacts when you engage in this charade with them. “Programming” ChatGPT, for example, looks a lot less like writing the explicit instructions of a computer language and a lot more like setting up a shared context for two human communicators, for example with an instruction like “You are an expert in the field of macro-economics who doesn’t shy away from radical theories,” designed to elicit or unlock a certain form or content in the response.

At the same time, in these conversations, the AI is very much in the position of a servant, and so the language mode we use tends to be that of the imperative: command and response (or, if you’ve had politeness embedded more deeply in your patterns of behaviour, you might ask ChatGPT questions with a “please”). It seems that the use of these AI systems fools our brains into making us think we are working together with another personal agent, albeit one that exists to satisfy our whims and experiments. One is reminded of the ur-chatbot ELIZA, which arguably passed the Turing Test in a limited way in the 1960s, and was based on technologies that were primitive in comparison with today’s LLMs. Sometimes, the servant/master paradigm is turned upside down, to devastating effect. A much more recent AI also named “Eliza” (do these people have no sense of irony?) took its human interlocutor down a dark path when it recommended he take his own life to help prevent climate change.

Now, in general I think treating non-persons like persons is prima facie less harmful than treating persons like non-persons. So how worrisome is this emerging pattern, dark edge cases aside? Who cares if we talk to our computers like people? We’ve been doing it for a while now with voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Cortana. We also talk to our pets like people, for that matter. In fact, the more we talk to other things like people, the more likely we are to treat them well, right? I’m not entirely sure. I worry that the flattening of the ontological landscape of personhood might have all kinds of adverse effects, the same way that the flattening of the relational landscape by social media has arguably wreaked havoc there. Facebook promised us greater connection with our friends, but by debasing the meaning of friendship in expanding it to the merest of relations, it has, with no small amount of irony, altered (and arguably eroded) traditional patterns of relationship.

Today, we treat ChatGPT like a person. Assuming ChatGPT isn’t feeding us unhealthy suggestions (as in the case of the modern “Eliza” above), that may not be the end of the world. But maybe tomorrow, we’ll be treating everyone else like ChatGPT, that is to say, as sheer surface interfaces we can use however we want. There is much more we could say here, but I don’t want to disappear into the realm of personalist philosophy and lose the thread. The main point is that the new AI interfaces blur the line between machine and human in a much more subtle and pervasive way than ever before. This is in fact one of the goals for these systems: to make it feel like you’re interacting with a person! AI or robotic “companions” are also widely available for romantic or caretaking purposes (particularly to ease the loneliness of the elderly), and it’s been well-documented that the attachments formed with these machine systems are robust and consequential. There have even been experiments run on users in mental health support settings where the “assistant” was ChatGPT instead of a human being, a fact undisclosed to the participants.

I worry that, in this mode, we will end up either infantilizing ourselves in dependence upon our individual AI genie, or becoming despotic overlords of an army of AI slaves (or, as is perhaps most likely, winding up in a bell-curve situation with people falling all across the spectrum). Neither extreme bodes well for our own character. Historically, questions about the validity of the personhood of one group or another have only led to oppression. Could this happen again? A pithy way of expressing the concern is thus: it’s dangerous to diminish anyone’s personhood, whether it be by me taking it from someone else (by treating a person like a non-person), or by me forfeiting my own (by treating a non-person like a person, i.e., giving my personal agency over to a non-entity in a kind of technological idolatry).

I think there is also a danger of subconsciously shifting the definition of “person” from “whatever it is that is intrinsically valuable about human beings qua human beings, regardless of individual capacity” to something more compatible with what AI presents in its capacities. What are these capacities? The ability to simulate reason, to produce novel texts, and to have disembodied textual conversations, for example. I worry that we may therefore wind up unconsciously holding the regressive philosophical position that identifies what’s valuable about a person with their ability to reason or produce abstract information. Or even if we don’t regress in our philosophical estimation of human personhood, we will at least have regressed to playing a form of social solitaire, pretending that we’re relating with another person when we’re just interacting with a machine dressed up as one. To the extent we surrender agency to these systems, we will also have regressed to making decisions via (technical) haruspex or by visiting (the AI equivalent of) the Oracle of Delphi. Here be dragons!

An obvious (instrumentalist) reply to this “confusion of personhood” concern (and to concerns about technologies in general) is that the danger here doesn’t lie in the technology itself, but would be solely the responsibility of the human user, since the technology is only ever active as a tool, an extension of human will. AI systems provide a convenient natural language interface, which in and of itself is a morally neutral fact, and affords for more efficient interaction. One could even argue that using our natural human language and voice re-humanizes the experience of interacting with computers, since we are no longer forced to “think like a computer”, e.g., when we come up with a search engine query. If someone goes “beyond the facts” and allows this more natural user interface to affect their social landscape in a harmful way, that’s on the user, not the AI. For example, to the person who falls in love with an AI system and then has their heart broken when the AI service is turned off, the instrumentalist would say that it’s their fault that they foolishly formed attachments to a transient machine in this way.

To a certain extent, the instrumentalist objection is true and correct. Whatever else technologies are, they are tools, and (leaving aside questions of consciousness on the part of AI) they are not agents with their own goals and desires. The objection misses two crucial points, however:

1. Tools and the affordances they provide are never “mere”, but shape their users to various degrees. In particular, the tools of modern technology inhere in a paradigm that places efficiency of the means of production of goods as the highest value. This inherence naturally creates a situation where values that might compete with efficiency (say, consensus within a community, or the meaningfulness of human work) are deprioritized in the operations of the tools themselves. Many examples of this pattern could be given, from the fact that human components in automated systems like assembly lines have to conform to the system (rather than the system to human variability), to the commonplace example of not being able to enter accurate data into a form on a website because the form assumes that responses must fit a predefined pattern.
2. Even if tools are not essentially value-laden, they pose moral challenges which individual users may not have the fortitude or ethical training to surmount. The more attractive and powerful the tools, the more we will be likely to engage with them without first having gained the moral character requisite for proper use. A list of obvious examples of such tools would include firearms, or addictive substances. In a world of perfect moral fortitude, it would theoretically be possible for every person on the planet to possess a nuclear bomb with no ill consequence, but this obviously has no bearing on actual reality. Why do we think that giving every teen unfettered access to Instagram will have better results? The fact that Instagram is a “mere tool” is no good response, if it time and time again poses ethical challenges too great for the average user to overcome.

Altering the structure of the creative process

Now let’s consider my second main worry: the role of AI in the process of human creativity. Many of the recent developments in AI have been as impressive as they are because they have shown an ability on the part of AI systems to generate creative artifacts previously associated only with significant human creative skill. These artifacts are highly underspecified by the prompts that the human generative “spark” provides as input, and thus represent a significant amount of “agency” (in the sense of determination over the final shape of the artifact) on the part of the AI. With a simple phrase or two, an AI “prompt engineer” can generate virtuoso-level digital paintings, play a song in the style of another artist, or write an essay that, while it may not win any awards (or pass a basic fact check for that matter), can arguably compete with what most undergraduates manage to produce in the hours before an assignment is due. These outputs are rightly lauded as incredible technical achievements. Working with ChatGPT is almost like having your own team of ghostwriters on call.

Of course the product is not always stellar (earlier versions of the Midjourney AI, for example, were famous for not being able to produce believable images of human hands, as good as it was at other things). There is thus a lot of debate about the quality of the output (on any number of levels, from aesthetic to ethical), but this is merely the feedback that will drive future improvements, and doesn’t count as deeper criticism. In my view, all of this focus on the output is precisely the problem, since it avoids looking at the human side of the equation altogether.

A 2-tier vs 3-tier model of the creative process

In the past (represented by what I’ll call the “traditional” or “2-tier” creative process), there were basically two halves to the creative equation: (1) the “creator” (the human being or beings), and (2) the “artifact” (the thing or event produced). Even if unskilled labour was involved somewhere in the process, it was either human labour (and therefore part of the human side of the equation), or a tool whose operation did not on its own determine the shape of the artifact per se, but was under the direct control of the human creator (making allowances for “chance” and “randomness” to count as such a tool).

In all of the AI examples, we have instead a 3-tier structure involving (1) the human “visionary”, (2) the impersonal AI “labourer” (which of course is trained on gazillions of examples of labour by humans), and (3) the creative “artifact” (output). It would be misleading or incorrect to call the human being in this case the “artist”, or the “writer”, or the “creator”, in any traditional sense. And so in a flash we’re in a totally different structural world than previously existed. What the current AI systems have enabled is the interposition of a significant creative force in between the human visionary and the artifact. We have taken something that was unified, and split it in two. (And hasn’t history shown, for example on the plane of the atom, that this practice can be explosive?)

Whether or not the move from a 2-tier to a 3-tier creative process is a regrettable change is up for debate. But certainly a world where human creators become more like directors or idea generators, more removed from the actual generative process, is a vastly different world than the one we have known, and that difference should be frankly acknowledged. It’s no counterargument to point out that humans have always used technology in the creative process. It’s true that tools like paintbrushes or, more recently, digital painting apps have been gladly adopted by artists looking for new ways to express their ideas. It’s tempting to view AI assistance as a difference in scale, but not in kind. What, at the end of the day, is the difference between a paintbrush and a visual AI assistant? Both allow the human creator to generate a visual artifact according to the human’s vision and goals. The AI assistant allows this to happen more or less instantaneously and more or less effortlessly, but so what?

I do want to argue, however, that there is a difference of kind at work as well. With AI we are not dealing with a dumb tool that might require a lesser or greater amount of skill to use fruitfully. With a paintbrush, there is a direct causal chain from my intentions to the final product, unbroken by another agent. With AI assistance, we have interposed an alien, or at least inscrutable, kind of intelligence in this chain. We have a kind of agent, however unconscious, that we let loose, with minimal guidance, to do the work on our behalf. (If I may be permitted a dramatic metaphor: what makes us think that we, in this picture, are the all-powerful Sorcerer, and not the bumbling Sorcerer’s Apprentice, about to be mired in a rising tide of consequences we are ill-equipped to resolve?)

I imagine that proponents of AI-assisted art would want to talk not about the loss of old creative processes but rather the new creative possibilities opened up by AI. They might say that we don’t have to focus purely on the creative artifact, but that human creativity can itself move up a layer of abstraction. In the same way that music producers nowadays take advantage of all manner of technological tools (software instruments, synthesizers, effects, and so on) to more rapidly get what’s in their head into audio form, so we also can view AI assistance in the creative process as merely a tool (however different in kind) that enables us to think about what we want to produce in the world at a higher level, and to get that into the world faster and with less effort. In fact, they might say, a new kind of skill and practice is in the process of being born: the practice of working in community with AI assistants to produce artifacts that take entire artistic fields to the next level. For now, I’m more than happy to give this perspective provisional space. It’s ultimately an empirical question whether this new creative dimension will be as satisfying as the old.

Regardless, I think it needs to be acknowledged that a myopic focus on the artifact (the product delivered by AI) will blind us to the consequences for the human side of the equation. It is ever thus with technological development. Albert Borgmann has collected a number of powerful examples of how, in chasing after a good, divorced by technology from the traditional modes of its production, we often lose something important that was intertwined with that mode. The introduction of central heating systems contributed to the collapse of community in family life among other things. The introduction of personal music players contributed to the decentralization of music in social life. And so on. The divorcing of the means from the ends is always a Faustian enterprise.

Let’s work through the example of AI technologies (vis a vis the creative process) now, by asking what part of the “means” of the traditional creative process might be beneficial for us as humans. What might be lost with this move to an AI-enabled, 3-tier model of creative production? I’ll offer a few suggestions, but want to flag this as an area that needs much more thought!

1. World Engagement. Turning an idea into reality requires engagement with reality, working with the push and pull of a world that exists in its own right and does not immediately bow to our whims with the sheer malleability of “data” (the way that ChatGPT, for example, might encourage us to believe, based on how easy it is to manipulate). Engagement with reality breeds humility, a sense of our own limits, and awareness of the need for development of skill in that engagement.
2. Authentic Self-Expression. The traditional creative process fully retains human agency throughout the chain of events. I may be a horrible visual artist, but at least the stick figures that I draw are exactly what I mean to draw (subject to the limits of my skill)—I do not need to go through n rounds of inquiry with an alien intelligence to generate them, and I do not need to settle for whatever the AI’s approximation of my intent turned out to be. We can think of this as a sort of Existential argument for authenticity, viewing artistic output as a more or less clear distillation of one’s self. ChatGPT, with the level of control it has over the form of the output, muddies the clarity of that distillation.
3. Practice. The creative process, as something requiring skill, is intrinsically a practice, something we do over and over again to become better at. In the case of many art forms, this practice is also an embodied one, engaging a multiplicity of senses and modes of relating with the world. Practice does not only lead to better creative artifacts, but it forms us into different (and I would argue better) persons. Albert Borgmann calls these practices “focal”, and he makes a strong case that the more we trade them for technologically-produced goods, the more diminished our human experience becomes.
4. Meaningful Effort and Achievement. The traditional creative process involves labour, and specifically meaningful labour, the kind which gives us a clear connection between effort and achievement, and results in well-deserved rest and celebration.
5. Community. The traditional creative process can be (though it certainly isn’t by necessity) a communal affair. Human partnerships are possible, indeed often centred, in the production of creative artifacts in a way that, at least so far, they do not appear to be centred in the practice of AI “prompt engineering”.
6. Understanding How Things Work. One of the consequences of the Device Paradigm is that, as technologies become more “available” (easier to use, among other things), they tend to become harder to understand for non-specialists. When my dad was young, he could tinker with and modify the engine in his cars. Nowadays, engines are so complex and integrated that they have become a “black box,” operated on only by highly trained and certified mechanics. Apple is famous for pushing in this direction with its hardware, focusing on sheer opacity for the sake of a streamlined user experience (and resulting in the backlash that is the Right to Repair movement). In the traditional creative process, the creator typically understands all or most of the elements of the process, even if in principle. A painter understands how a paintbrush works (not least because a paintbrush is a totally transparent device—its physical shape discloses its function almost immediately). AI assistance is, on the other hand, about as black a box as can be. With many large models, while it’s clear how the model is trained, it’s not always possible to see why any particular input generates any particular output. Even the developers of the model cannot always look at the system and understand how it works. Making changes to the model is often a process simply of selecting new sorts of training data and hoping things work better. The AI-assisted creator is in no better position to understand any of this. They trade in a formerly clear knowledge of the tools used in the creative process for the role of coaxing an inscrutable model to produce something akin to the desired result. People like my dad have lamented the lack of ability to understand what is happening in a modern car engine. People like myself have lamented the lack of ability to poke around inside an Apple computer, or make hardware upgrades. When we understand how things work, we feel empowered and capable. But I worry that we will face a significant loss of understanding and empowerment, as traditional creative methods are replaced by the black box of AI.

There are no doubt more aspects of the AI-free creative process that we could highlight. The point I want to drive home is that the loss of all of these “side effects” of the traditional process would be consequential indeed, even if only for those engaged in the process. The benefits are obvious—easy production, less gatekeeping of traditional roles in art, the proliferation of more creative content in the world. I don’t mean to devalue these positive developments, and to a certain extent I take them for granted. The benefits are right there on the surface of the technologies as they are advertised to us, after all. It is the costs which are generally hidden, and thus need to be considered carefully!

Ultimately, we can allow my concerns to be evaluated empirically (so long as the goalposts of what counts as meaningful for human existence don’t get moved along the way). What actually happens when artists or other creatives spend their time employing AI assistants instead of engaging in the traditional creative process? How do they feel about their work? Do they feel that the skills developed involve the use of all of their faculties in a challenging and fulfilling way? Do they feel that the fundamental impulse to connect emotionally and intellectually with their audiences in an authentic way has been made more or less transparent? And so on.

The relationship between personhood and creativity

What if the “personhood” concern and the “creative process” concern are not two totally separate things, despite how I’ve presented them so far? What if human personhood and human creativity are more fundamentally linked? Despite the common aversion of people to self-identify as “artists”, it appears to have been demonstrated that, at least in kindergarten, everyone is an artist. 

I have, it’s true, a vested interest in seeing the world this way. I co-founded a startup with a mission to convince everyone that they are indeed an “artist”, that the “quality” of their creative output depended more on the meaningful stories driving it than their technical ability to cast those stories into traditional artistic modes. My favourite theology sees God’s act of creation not as the laying down of immovable strictures but as the invitation to us to continue that act of creation through our own creative acts. And so I will not attempt to argue in a purely disinterested way that human beings are essentially creative. 

For one thing, to say that creativity is both necessary and sufficient for human personhood runs into a variety of philosophical problems. Some particular human beings might not evince much of what we judge to be creativity, after all. But it does seem evident that much of what we appreciate about the creative artifacts we recognize as such is the human meaning invested in them. Whether the artifact is a painting, a song, or a building, when we hear the human story that launched a particular creative process on its way, or indeed the story of the creative process itself (with all its accompanying challenges and accidents), we find a connection of meaning with the creator, via their artifact, that transcends the artifact’s particular physical or aesthetic form. Our aesthetic relationship with the products of human creativity therefore goes one step further than our relationship with, e.g., the beauty of the natural world. And so I take it for granted that human personhood is a necessary precondition for this heightened kind of aesthetic experience consisting in the connection of meaning established between the creator and the ones experiencing their creative artifact.

What kind of meaning lies behind a piece of AI-generated artwork? If we leave aside, as I have been doing, the possibility that AI systems are actually conscious agents, then it is hard to see how there is anything approaching “meaning” in their outputs. A connection of meaning can exist between human beings in a relatively transparent way given our shared evolutionary and historical trajectory, i.e., the fact that we can inhabit each others’ lived experiences to a significant degree. When a neural network produces a poem about the frustration of never-ending spring rains in Vancouver (something I would very much like to do at this moment), the poem does not result from any subjective experience of the rains in question, however much the AI feeds upon the tokens of people who have had those experiences. It is therefore a refracted representation of a set of tokens which were originally causally and meaningfully connected to spring rains, but that’s it. Nothing’s going on “inside” the AI which we might care about in the way we care about the backstory of a human creator.

If this is a true insight, then maybe we can propose a provisional “law of process aesthetics”, defined for now without rigour: creative artifacts are aesthetically valuable in proportion to the amount of human intention, effort, care, and meaning involved in their production, and to the extent these factors are known by the beholder. The two concerns about AI I discussed above are thus particularly concerning, because when conjoined they do away entirely with the important aesthetic relation of meaningfulness. When I identify what is most essential about personhood with qualities that can be said to belong to AI systems, then I forfeit an ability to relate on the plane of shared human experience outside those “rational” qualities. And when I settle for an AI-generated prelude to my novella, I miss the opportunity to implant a discoverable and relatable meaning in my work (or at least meaning that flows from me as a person instead of from the global amalgam of personal artifacts that constitutes the training data for an LLM).

One interesting corollary of the proposed “law” is that certain types of AI-assisted projects might be considered to be aesthetically valuable indeed. Imagine a scenario where a talented painter used something like ChatGPT to put pixels of specific colours in specific locations upon a canvas, as if they were talking to their paintbrush instead of manipulating it directly. A beautiful painting produced this way would exhibit a high degree of human intention, effort, care, and meaning, with potentially multiple layers of meaning given the choice to use a suboptimal tool in the production of the painting (or maybe the only available tool, if the artist did not have the use of their hands). In this case, the use of AI does not appear to diminish at all the human creativity and meaning involved, and I would not want to argue otherwise myself.

On the other hand, an AI painting generated by the prompt “Draw me a beautiful lake in the country in the style of Cezanne” would not count as aesthetically very valuable or meaningful on this scheme, regardless of the sheer visual beauty of the artifact. I take this to be a relatively uncontroversial outcome as well.

Living in an AI-assisted future

It’s time to descend from abstract and maybe tendentious thinking about aesthetics and human creativity and come back to the real world. Even if a number of people are swayed by arguments like the ones I’ve been making, the fact is that AI assistance is too powerful a promise for most people to refuse. Particularly in cases where the traditional creative process doesn’t feel all that fulfilling (like writing a paper for a class you don’t much care about), it might not seem that the cost of adopting AI is very high. To be honest, I’m not sure what to do about such cases, other than to make the personal and societal arguments from a place of vigorous and impassioned celebration of human creativity (i.e., to engage in “ deictic discourse”), and hope they resonate at some level as a kind of virtue ethic. (I, for one, am not currently tempted to use an AI assistant even in mundane writing tasks, for all the reasons above, particularly because I want the things that are attached to my name to be authentic processions of me, not my intent filtered through an afterimage of all the words ever uploaded to the web. I leave open, of course, the possibility that use cases might arise for which my personal calculus changes!)

One of my hopes in all of this is a possible backlash to the looming flood of AI-created artifacts. When artifacts of sufficient quality are so easily produced, it may be that we start to value not so much the “quality” per se of the art but the human elements that make art meaningful and relatable, and the human practice and skill that we honour in the artifact. Until AI agents have lived experiences that approximate our own, the story behind a piece of AI-generated art is just not going to be as meaningful. I wonder if we will start to gravitate towards art that has an “AI-free” label because we know we are going to encounter something more “real”, the way a certain segment of the population prefers “hormone-free” and “additive-free” organic foods. In other words, we might add a new dimension to the concept of provenance of creative artifacts, and not just for high art but for everyday “knowledge worker” output as well. Even if this happens, I’m concerned that economic pressures will tend to make higher-human-involved products (like organic foods, or this putative 100% AI-free art) more expensive, with the concomitant reduction in access to goods which should arguably belong to everyone. (Update: a few days after posting this article, I saw an example of this in the wild!)

Regardless of how it shakes out economically, I do see the possibility of a natural reaction against commodified AI-generated artifacts on the horizon, which gives me hope that at least a significant minority will continue to value traditional, human-centred modes of creativity. This minority might even push more boldly into that field than we currently experience, rediscovering and moving forward older or forgotten arts that were superseded by technological means. External economic support from a patron class or a government source would no doubt be necessary to make this whole story sustainable, in the way Albert Borgmann proposes a political affirmation of traditional modes of production over against the commoditizing force of technology.

I think the basic questions we all need to ask are, (1) “What makes human life meaningful and valuable?” And (2) “What does a use of AI look like which fully respects those aspects of human life?” Answering the first question will be difficult because it has always been difficult. Answering the second question will involve confronting some of the unintended side effects of AI use that might ultimately be detrimental for faculties that we prize highly in ourselves, like our creativity. And maybe this is one good outcome of the rise of AI: it might compel us to take the first question more seriously than we have so far!

Right now, sitting as we are in the full upswing of the AI hype cycle, it’s easy to focus on the promises, the benefits, and the technical legerdemain enacted for our amazement. But we should not lose sight of the fact that technology, if it is to be good, must always be subjugated to, and limited by, higher human values. Too often technological development becomes its own end (the “efficiency” fetish, per Ellul). We already see this with AI, where the AI “arms race” is being intentionally escalated by major companies. Hubris is dangerous enough, but when coupled with wilful myopia, it is a recipe for catastrophe. I want us to take a deep breath and think a little bit about what we really value in our lives, our selves, our communities, and whether the catapulting of AI into all of these areas is really going to make them better. I fully expect that, in a number of ways and dimensions, the answer will be “yes”! And in some areas I expect that it will be “no”. My hope, whatever we decide, is that we come to these answers after a process of settled discernment, not simply as a result of the conveyor-belt adoption of whatever the tech magnates have decided will make our lives easier, or their pockets heavier. (One also gets the sneaking suspicion that capitalist money-grabbing is not even the primary motivation in the frenzied development of AI. A decidedly religious zeal accompanies the pronouncements of the field’s top stars, and the hope with which their flocks look to “AGI” or “The Singularity” to solve all our problems makes old-fashioned Fundamentalism look almost thoughtful by comparison).

A Tolkien-inspired technology virtue ethic

As a huge Sci-Fi/Fantasy nerd, I can’t conclude without attempting some reference to an epic story, in this case, The Lord of the Rings. I was struck recently by something I noticed about the narrative in those novels which is instructive for our purposes. It’s been frequently observed that Sauron’s One Ring stands for the kind of power which is so overwhelming, and so tied to Sauron’s nature, that it can only corrupt. (Some have indeed wondered if it is a cipher for modern technology.) Anyone that comes into contact with the Ring is ultimately overcome by its power and turns to evil. The truly “good” characters in the narrative are those who reject the offer of the Ring entirely (Gandalf, Galadriel, or Faramir–the book version of him–for example, in contrast to Boromir or even Frodo, who ultimately succumbs). So far, this could all be cast as a “substantivist” critique of modern technology: technology, like the Ring, has its own internal “force” that ultimately determines the outcome, regardless of the intentions of the mortal wielder. We don’t generally believe this hard-line take on technology, which appears to have a nature much more complex than either a simple instrumentalist or substantivist view can account for.

Interestingly, there’s a good deal more nuance implicit in the narrative world, which I only just recognized: Gandalf, Galadriel, and Elrond are all ring wielders themselves, bearing the three Elvish rings forged around the same time as the One Ring. Galadriel may have said “no” to the tempting possibilities of the One Ring, but she didn’t say “no” to rings of power in general, and was happy to make use of Nenya (her ring) for certain, more constrained, purposes (such as the sustaining of Lothlórien and its people). I think we have here a more realistic philosophy of technology, more or less dependent on a kind of virtue ethic, that can be useful for us in the current situation. Some technology may have the morally overwhelming force of the One Ring, and to such technologies the appropriate response is humility, the recognition that I, at least, will not be able to wield such power responsibly without dire consequence. But other technologies might be suitable for me.

Which technologies are which depend on a variety of factors, not least my own character. (Boromir, for example, would probably not have been trustworthy to wield one of the Elvish rings, either. And we are certainly led to assume that Saruman is not worthy of whatever ring it is that he apparently acquired along the way.) We can extrapolate this point to the level of society as well. Which technologies we allow to run free in our society depends jointly on the nature of the technologies and on the level of maturity we generally exhibit in society in relation to those technologies. If we want to take advantage of higher-powered and more consequential technologies, then perhaps we must first focus on asking which practices will generate the kind of character, at the level of both individual and society, that can safely engage with those technologies. We already encode this way of treating technology to a certain degree legally, for example with minimum drinking ages or driving tests. Until we can figure out the appropriate methods for developing and confirming character vis a vis other consequential technologies—and maybe forever in the case of some technologies—we are best off emulating Galadriel, who was content to allow her own diminishment rather than become something more powerful, yes, but ultimately less good.

(Many thanks to Matt Civico , Justin Smith , Adam Graber , and Nick Bott , who reviewed drafts of this essay and provided helpful feedback, insights, examples, and in some cases, copyediting! All views and errors are my own, etc…, etc…)

On-demand apps and the sharing economy

JL: We’ve already talked about the Internet of Things, so I think I’ll skip that question. There’s this other hot area in technology, which is the rise of on-demand goods and services applications where anything that we want, whether a good or a service, is wrapped up into an app designed to get us that thing as instantly and reliably as possible. You might have heard of Instacart or Uber or all these apps which are replacing the traditional mechanisms for procuring things, in a way which makes them more available. It’s the Device Paradigm. But to me it’s interesting that it’s being splintered into each good or commodity having its own app or service. It’s this kind of very clear picture of the fragmentation that you were talking about in your book. People love these apps; people whose lives are busy, for whom going grocery shopping is a chore that takes them away from quality time with their family or the little time that they have after work, or an app that can get a maid to your house in 10 minutes to clean and you never have to see them and it just charges your credit card and it’s just so convenient and it frees you up. There’s this disburdenment. It’s all very Device Paradigm in essence. What would you say to somebody who is really feeling the benefit of that? How could you convince them that maybe this is taking something away, or would you?

AB: Well again there are special cases where these things are a godsend, and so fine.

JL: If you’re a starving person a Big Mac is a godsend.

AB: Right. It’s an iteration of the unkept promise of technology. So it saves people time. What for? It’s Marx’s remark, you know, all these wonderful things [that come from] free time. It just never happened. Free time—what for? Either to work more, or to indulge in consumption that is the antithesis of engagement and the Good Life.

JL: So it’s hard because at any given point, disburdenment feels disburdening. But then it becomes a moving target and if you choose to work more or consume more you don’t realize that you’re putting yourself in a position where you’re going to choose more disburdenment later, rather than choose another path entirely which would have kept you from the subseqent need for that disburdenment.

AB: And as you know, when it comes to liberty (you know people make a distinction between liberty from and liberty for)… the question is never asked “disburdenment from?” Great, what for? Oops!

JL: It’s just the assumed good that nobody questions.

AB: So there’s always this utopian notion, we’ll read Shakespeare and play an instrument. We’ll take our kids to the park.

JL: But instead we’ll catch up on e-mail and stick an iPad in front of our kids’ faces.

AB: Right.

A way forward for the promise and reform of technology

JL: Yeah, OK. So with this blog series that I’ve been doing on your book, I know that a small handful of people have been reading it, and hopefully more in the future. So the question is, what would you say to those of us who’ve read these articles from my blog or who’ve read your book itself who are “literate laypeople” who’ve powered through the book, struggled through, whatever. What’s next? What should we be aware of or concerned about? These possibilities of reform for technology that you mentioned, have they changed, have they expanded, have they shrunk? I sometimes look at the future and I see this polarization of this rabidly technological culture or this rabidly Luddite culture that completely disconnects. Is that what you see happening? Do you see a different way forward that’s more productive?

AB: Well, as you know I think there always has to be a technological substructure to our lives.

JL: You can’t get away from that anymore.

AB: No. So I think the hopeful things, inspiring things, are where people understand this and then within the framework of technology are able to find celebration, which is easier, and then work, which is harder. So the food industry, the “foodies”, is a very hopeful thing. We had a conference here on food and there was a table with books and I couldn’t believe how many wonderful books there were. And these people use technology. They use the Internet, they use cars of course. They use sprinkler systems… As you also know, the focal reality is not just traditional, it has a new kind of splendor. So the things that they grow have a sort of force in their own right as they come out of their drip systems or whatever they use to grow them. To come back to the earlier point: one title that I use in the book which I think is still appropriate is “local, labor-intensive industries”. Whatever comes under this heading. You know, Matt Crawford’s first book talks about his shop for motorbikes. Those are the wonderful things that give me hope. As I said, the crucial thing you have to look for is that they enforce coherence and assert themselves.

JL: And be a unified front which people see as distinct from the dominant mode.

AB: Right. And to the extent that these people are tech-savvy, that’s a big plus. Because they’re not Luddites. The terms Luddite and neo-Luddite are used loosely. So in one sense they are. But they don’t destroy things. They use them, but they are able to subordinate them to reality in some way.

JL: It was interesting living in San Francisco, because there is a big foodie culture, a big artisan culture, and a focus on local things, but also it’s the global epicenter of the many aspects of the Device Paradigm. So I see a large tension between these two things and I think there’s a dissonance there, but a lot of people seem not to notice it in their own lives. They work for 15 hours a day at their tech startup with no grounding and no free time, but then they go and enjoy the foodie scene and order only local and organic things. So they appreciate it as a cultural phenomenon but it doesn’t seem to be inspiring them to reflect on other aspects of their lives. Is that what you’re talking about where you hope that there can be a greater force for these things, more of a voice in some way?

AB: Yeah. I once counted how many philosophers, professional philosophers, there are in this country. Many thousands. What the people in San Francisco need is a theory, and a theory tells them how things fit together in a stable and sustainable way. That they’re not just saying, “oh yeah it’s romantic, this restaurant”. But of course that’s not the culture, or sometimes as you say they’re conflicted. Should I give up my job and teach high school? A theory should allow people to see the hope. What the good things are, and the bad things are, and how the good things fit together in an intellectually defensible and practically sustainable way. And philosophers just aren’t doing that. Philosophers are… I mean, when it comes to free will, you won’t believe how many different schools there are! So it’s not just one school that deals with free will. There are all these factions and they just love fighting each other. So philosophy is really remiss in its social responsibility. I’m not saying that people shouldn’t do analytic philosophy, it’s just that not everybody should do it.

JL: It shouldn’t be the gold standard of philosophical debate, because people need as you were saying something to help them live their lives, and philosophy’s not giving it to them.

AB: Right.

The history and trajectory of the philosophy of technology

JL: OK, so speaking of philosophy, the philosophy of technology: as far as I know you’ve been in the field as long as anybody. So how do you see it having evolved over time, in terms of the questions people ask? It sounds like you already answered this saying it’s gone in this analytic direction, but could you maybe give a couple exemplar questions or debates that in the last 50 years would have changed?

AB: Well, it began in ‘74 or ‘76 with the conference at the University of Delaware. The great founders were Paul Durbin and Carl Mitcham. Those are the two. And you must be familiar with Thomas Kuhn. So it was a pre-paradigmatic period. People were saying all kinds of different things. The thing didn’t have any shape. And then out of this conference came positions. Don Ihde at SUNY Stonybrook, is one of them. Paul Durban’s sort of activist model, and Langdon Winner with a kind of political version of it. And so amazingly the people got together, and they wrote their books! And gave the thing shape. So there were distinct positions that emerged. Paradigms in the Kuhnian sense. And all of them had often an implicit but always a very strong moral and social force to them.

JL: I can see that having met Langdon and Carl. Very strong in that sense.

AB: And so that continued into the 80s and 90s and then the Dutch took over, and they’re spending enormous amounts of money institutionally on philosophy of technology, bless their hearts. They’re doing some good things in response to the first stage but what then sort of arose from outside of philosophy is the social studies of science. Latour. Bruno Latour. And there were some British guys who did this, and they sort of took over the field of technology and science and merged the two into technoscience, which I think was a disaster.

JL: Well it’s not very interesting work to read from my perspective.

AB: But it was sort of sexy.

JL: Because you could claim it as a science? Or why was it attractive?

AB: If you have a choice between interesting but false and true but trivial, everyone goes for interesting but false. And false sort of gets concealed for a while. So these people came up as revolutionaries, and they’re often… there was always this tendency to appease the humanist and social scientists about physics. “That’s just a way of talking”. And that’s an easy way of dealing with physics, other than learning quantum physics, which is hard. Or just special relativity, which is fairly hard. Do I want to go back and learn calculus again to understand? No, it’s just “we talk this way, they talk that way”. So just like Derrida in the study of the literature, people felt sort of great. They were in charge and they showed those scientists! So they took over for a while and Don Ihde to some extent bought it. Do you know Don Ihde?

JL: He wasn’t there so I didn’t meet him but his work was referenced a lot.

AB: He sort of bought in on this. Not totally, but largely.

JL: Is that the stuff about world-something…?

AB: Well multi-stability is his big thing, and then mediation theory and stuff like that. That I think was one way towards self-absorption. Who wants to read Latour? And some of it is just sexy terminology without anything really new. So the “agency of things”. A speed bump, for example—it talks to you and says, “slow down!” Well big deal! And then the Dutch were enamored with the rigor and precision of analytic philosophy. And rigor and precision are admirable things, but the price for precision is impoverishment. The richer the phenomenon, the less it submits to rigor and precision. That’s just the way it is. Modeling is a good example. You must know that well! Models get so complex finally there’s no insight at all. You just hope the thing’s gonna work. So rigor and precision in one sense have to be left aside to make the thing work. Rigor and precision are dangerous tools because the impoverishment often creeps in unnoticed.

JL: You’re following the rules and doing the things and coming up with these what are essentially tautological conclusions, so it feels like you’re doing work for a while.

AB: Well, finer and finer distinctions. And again, I’m not against it. It’s just the displacement of more substantive work. So I think the philosophy of technology in one thing just failed spectacularly because in 1976 we all thought, what’s the big thing today? It’s philosophy of science. So what’s next? It’s gotta be philosophy of technology. But within the overall profession, it’s totally marginal. Less than marginal. Efforts were made to give it mainstream respectability, but I think we should just give up on it. The way that some of the Dutch try to gain respectability for it… it’s just the death of its cultural and social significance.

JL: So this is something that’s relevant for me personally. I would love to see it revived in a more practical and connected way that is doing what the original call of philosophy was, which is sort of what you pointed out: giving people tools for thinking that connect with the way that they’re living their lives and help them understand what they’re doing.

What the philosophy of technology needs

AB: I think one has to be careful not to do this in a sort of procedure- and method-oriented way, you know, “I want philosophy that’s like this and like this”. But rather be content- and substance-oriented. What is it out there that cries out for philosophical illumination? And it’s the impact of ICT! What is it doing to people? As far as influence is concerned: Kant says about happiness, don’t pursue it. It’s a wil-o-the-wisp. What you can pursue and should pursue is being worthy of happiness. The same thing with influence. Don’t beat the bushes and… write something that’s worthy of being influential. And then you have to leave it up to the culture, whether it responds or not. But clearly there’s something out there. As I said it should be worthy of influence in the sense that if David Brooks—do you know him?—if he read it, he would say, “Oh my God, yes. That really allows me to talk about things in a way that I’ve been struggling to talk about”.

JL: Like you were pointing out with New York Times articles. I read op-eds that show this cultural need where people are aching for the ability to talk about something, and there’s books like Matthew Crawford’s books, and Sherry Turkle… there’s a lot of pop culture stuff coming out that’s all sort of throwing a random splash of paint here and here, and it’s not really pulling it all together in a philosophically compelling way, but it is showing that that’s where the need is, instead of where philosophy of technology currently is, where people are talking about the philosophy of science oriented processes of how technologists work and technology works.

AB: Right.

Postscript

Author’s note: At this point time was up and the interview concluded. I am deeply grateful to Albert for his conversation and hospitality! And I recommend checking out his works, particularly TCCL. Once again, for an overview of that book, refer to my blog series which covers it.

The promise of technology

JL: Sometimes I’m talking to people about your work, and, maybe as in the case of the conference I went to, people were familiar with it, but held a common misunderstanding that you are fundamentally opposed to technology or are really negative about technology. But based on some of the things you wrote (and you can tell me if I’m getting it wrong) it sounded like you were really affirming some of the original promise of technology…

AB: Absolutely!

JL: …But really want to caution us not to trade what’s meaningful and central in our lives for the sake of availability. And so how would you respond to someone who claims you’re anti-technology or anti-progress?

AB: I sympathize with these people. You have to pigeonhole writers, otherwise you just get lost! They just put me in the wrong pigeonhole, that’s all. I think it’s just that these people haven’t read the book; that’s obvious. They’ve just heard about it, or they might have read excerpts. I mean, one of the later chapters (I’m not sure you have blogged it yet), mentions “the recovery of technology”. To recover! There is something genuine in this promise of liberation and enrichment. I think focal things and practices help us to recover that promise. Think of an example I use: you go running on a cold, rainy, muddy day and you come back and you’re shivering and you think, boy a shower is wonderful. Whereas a shower every morning..? Or hunger: if you allow yourself to get hungry, if you’re totally spent and hungry and then there’s a Big Mac… well that’s a great thing. It’s just this super-saturation with commodities that makes us ungrateful. And there’s a tragedy, I think, in technology, and it’s probably haunting your work too, Jonathan, and that is that information technology is just a marvel of ingenuity and cooperation. Physically, conceptually: it’s amazing! Totally amazing. And how did it happen? Through cooperation. It wasn’t Edison who did it, or Neumann, the mathematician, or whoever. It’s thousands and thousands of people who contribute their little part. Something like this is a marvel. And you can’t help but be full of admiration. And so the ingenuity, the devotion, the intelligence, the self-sacrifice that goes into it is amazing. And then what is it used for? What’s this thing used for? All my students as soon as they get out of class…

JL: Instead of elevating us it’s distracting us.

AB: So there is this terrible asymmetry between the ingenuity that goes into the means and the stupefaction that it largely has. And again, of course, you have to acknowledge the possibilities and limited actuality of people using an iPhone to stay in touch with their children, or staging a revolution, or… if iPhones were used for just that… I think they sold 13 million of their new iPhone 6?

JL: The 6S that was just released?

AB: They wouldn’t sell them if there weren’t all these teenagers looking at their smartphone.

JL: …who already had the previous revision of the iPhone anyway!

AB: So I think the problem is not that technology needs to be scolded and condemned and vilified. It needs redemption! We have to recover a sense of how wonderful it is and I don’t think that’s going to happen without a grounding in something that’s not technological. Sometimes I just have to shake my head. People say, “Borgmann doesn’t allow for the fact that devices can be engaging!” I have examples of engaging devices. Fine downhill skis that allow you to do things that with the old wooden boards you weren’t able to do.

JL: Yeah I like what you were talking about in some of the chapters on nature. There are two things I appreciate. One is you acknowledge the reality that a nice pair of trail running shoes in a sense is a device, but in a sense one shouldn’t refuse them on the grounds that it’s not traditional. At this point, going off into the wilderness without the appropriate gear is just courting danger and disaster in a way that’s irresponsible. The truth is that we don’t have to do it the way the early pioneers did it anymore. There’s sort of a mature acquiescence to that, saying we no longer have to put ourselves in that much danger to go outside. But we can still go outside, and in a way, like maybe with the example of these downhill skis, technology can be used not to take us away from that engagement, but to give us an ability to experience it with fewer barriers. So a nice pair of trail running shoes enables you to have the feeling of moving through the woods like a wild creature in a way that a heavy pair of leather hiking boots from 100 years ago would not give you the ability to do.

Virtual reality, videogames, and technological “art”

AB: Exactly. The requirement is that devices be transparent to reality. And of course virtual reality is the opposite. It’s the exact opposite.

JL: Sheer opacity.

AB: Videogames are an example. Are they the successor of nineteenth-century novels? Works of art that should be appreciated? Again I think it’s an empirical question. What is it doing to people? What are they doing to people, videogames? Virtual reality is still facing technical problems…

JL: It’s coming along. Things like Oculus and whatnot, they’re moving to mass production pretty soon.

AB: And then again you have to be an empiricist. Are there virtual reality experiences that people come away from the way they come back from, I don’t know, watching a Greek tragedy, or Beethoven’s 9th or something like this?

JL: But isn’t there a concern that people would say “yes”, that the empirical data would show that virtual reality and videogames are like Beethoven simply because our baseline of experience is already so technologized? If all you’ve had in your life is a Big Mac and then you go and have a very simple home-cooked meal… I mean this was the way that I grew up, where actually for my family going out to McDonald’s was a treat. For me, that’s where I wanted to go on my birthday, when I could choose to go anywhere. I didn’t know that it was a technological device, I just knew that I loved these chicken nugget pieces that probably weren’t even chicken. For me that was an amazing experience. So if you polled me then, I would say that McDonald’s was much better than Grandma’s meatloaf or potato casserole or whatever. So that’s something that makes me feel a little more distressed. I wonder if the more we “progress” the more we lose the ability for people to make that comparison for themselves in a meaningful way?

AB: Right. Well, I think we come back to the question of the Good Life. The question is, let’s say virtual reality experiences are becoming common, and some people get really mystical about it, and claim to have mystical experiences or whatever. We just have to see what happens. If it happens that these people come back from these virtual reality experiences in a way where they seem serene, and compassionate, and resourceful… well fine! Great. Then we want to find out why it’s happening and how does it compare with religious or artistic experience. I have my suspicions though…

JL: Yeah I suspect that they’ll probaby come back more anxious and distracted and it will be harder to live in the real world. They may find serenity but only in the virtual world.

Evolutionary mismatch theory

AB: I think you just have to give the advocates some slack, you know, and say OK let’s try it. One thing I may not touch on at all in TCCL is evolution, and one thing I’ve learned since is how deeply evolution fits us into the past and into reality and how complex and profound these ties are. Exactly how evolution connects with ethics is complex and interesting, but the way we’re put together by nature is to be in the world in an engaged way. That’s what makes us happy. That’s how we evolved and learned to prosper. There is a whole field called mismatch theory—have you heard of it? It compares our evolutionary endowments and what’s called the ancestral environment (sometimes called “the environment of evolutionary adaption”), which is the environment that the human family lived through for probably a million years and within which we learned to prosper. We sort of know what it was like from examples of the hunting and gathering cultures that have survived into the 20th century. And then if you articulate these conditions and then compare them with the conditions that the technological culture provides, it’s a mismatch. And so people feel anxious, they get obese, they get all kinds of diseases. So virtual reality is, I think, more mismatch. That’s a good guess, but I think you should never be dogmatic. You should be liabilist, falsifiabilist, and open to being shown to be wrong.

JL: Yeah, it kind of puts me in the mind of a couple examples. People who thought that theism and evolution were incompatible, or who think that theism (or Christianity) for example and life on other worlds would be incompatible. For me it’s kind of a, well, if there is there is, and it may mean something about God for us or it may not. It might be relevant, but I don’t think that one can look at the Bible and presume to know a universal intent around life and the shape that life would take universally. Is that the kind of openness that you’re talking about? We just have to kind of see about this virtual reality thing. And we think that it will be probably not a vehicle for let’s say some kind of true spirituality, but you don’t know until you see how people are shaped by it.

AB: Yes, exactly.

JL: So back to this misunderstanding that you’re opposed to technology.

AB: Yeah, I’m not mad at these people. Pigeonholing is a survival necessity and so I just get put in the wrong pigeonhole.

JL: Graciously allow yourself to be the straw man!

AB: Well I do respond if I come across it.

JL: I was surprised, because I was reading your book to do a blog just a week before I went to SPT and you had a sentence (it might be the same one you just referred to), which was very positive about the promise and redemption of technology. I came across some people at the conference who had this pigeonholed view of you, and I said, “no, I just read this sentence two days ago and I can assure you he’s not that”. So it does seem the pigeonholing has had its effect over the years.

AB: That’s fine.

Meaning and significance in a perfectly available world

JL: So continuing on from there, I read you as making the claim that a perfectly safe, perfectly convenient world of availability that the Device Paradigm is geared towards is essentially one that’s devoid of the possibility of a narrative for human significance. So I wanted to ask, first of all, if that’s in fact what you’re saying. And if so, how would you motivate that claim in a generation, my generation, that really believes this liberal democratic ideal that meaning and significance are just whatever we choose them to be? And thereby compatible with this perfectly safe, perfectly available world.

AB: The answer to the first question is yes, and to the second… The answer to the second connects with things we’ve talked about and that is that you have to ask people who center their life in ICT or cyberspace how they’re doing. And then at a more philosophically sophisticated level you have to point out to them that people who claim that they’re imposing meaning on reality are just the captives of stereotypes. It’s fame and fortune! I want to be like Justin Bieber! If you’re a boy. Or I don’t know, Beyonce.

JL: So you’re essentially saying that this belief that we can choose whatever meaning we want is sort of hollow and empty and not true in practice.

AB: Right. But there is a grain of truth to this belief and you’re the perfect illustration. So Jessica [JL’s wife, who grew up in a small town in Illinois] has been blessed with a grounded life, from which she can draw strength and orientation, and for you it’s not the case. So it’s a distinction of degree of course. You have to sort of be open to things that claim you and learn to see how they converge. It’s characteristically American that every person is a point of convergence of many things, and you don’t make them converge. They converge in your life, and you have to be alert to them, and of course help them to grow together into something meaningful. So running is part of your life, right? And the experience of nature that comes with it. I take it you run outside?

JL: Yeah, we live in downtown San Francisco, so as much as I can. I run along the water, but I prefer running on trails, which I just don’t get to do very often.

AB: And then your cuisine is probably a convergence of Mid-western cooking and Texas cuisine?

JL: Well… it’s a little more complicated than that. But cuisine is important to us.

AB: Well anyway. What’s your.. I forget your last name?

JL: Lipps.

AB: Is it German?

JL: Yes.

AB: So you can’t say, I’m a Lipps, and the Lippses have always cooked this way! You can’t say that. That would be fake. You could embrace it if somehow…

JL: If I wanted to reappropriate that ancestral thing.

AB: You could only reappropriate it if it claimed you in some sense, right?

JL: I can’t reappropriate Native American traditions.

AB: Right. So these things are philosophically very interesting and subtle. I’m a determinist so I think you should think of a person as the wonderful convergence of billions of things. So the people who say you make your own meaning, they’re mistaken in this activist way they put it. It should be more receptive. But they’re right that the way the meaning of life comes to them does not have the homogeneity of an inherited culture. And that’s a wonderful thing.

JL: So you can choose which convergences you allow to dominate your experiences of life, and there are more convergences than there were maybe 500 years ago because of the more diverse cultural context we’ve lived in? Is that what you’re saying?

Determinism and libertarianism

AB: Yeah. Are you a determinist or libertarian when it comes to free will?

JL: I’ve usually been a pretty strong libertarian.

AB: Yeah, well it’s incoherent, I’m sorry to say! “Free” is undetermined, is uncaused, is random. There’s no way to break this.

JL: The way that I break it is countenancing agency as a fundamental universal substance.

AB: A ghost in the machine?

JL: Why not?

AB:

JL: We can talk about it at dinner. Nobody believes it, I know.

AB: Worse than that, you can’t tell how a universal agency… what are the levers that it works on, and how can it work on levers when it’s not… you know it’s the Cartesian problem of, I forget the name of the gland, the pineal gland, where he thought that’s where the… at any rate, you’re right.

JL: I’m not a substance dualist, but…

AB: Well you’re courting substance dualism, aren’t you?

JL: Sure. But growing up in the evangelical Christian tradition, courting substance dualism is second nature (pun intended)!

AB: Well these are the things that make philosophy fun.

JL: Well let’s talk more about that at dinner, it’ll be a fun conversation.

AB: Yeah. So at any rate if you’re a determinist like me, what you realize is it’s this wonderful situation where billions of things come together and fuse in your mind and in your brain. But they don’t fuse mysteriously. They fuse both intelligbly and unreachably. There is a complexity that you understand. 86 billion neurons and trillions of synapses. So there’s no way of mapping the thing. And yet, there’s Jonathan, there’s Jessica, there’s me. We’re persons! So “choosing” always needs to be rephrased and that’s one of the fun challenges of philosphy. I think it’s best to think of oneself as the fusion of many things and being that fusion, you’re a force in your own right. You’re not just effects. The effects fuse into this amazingly resourceful cause, but the basic attitude is much more one of gratitude than power.

JL: I definitely agree with that aspect of it.

AB: These are just, in a way, differences of discourse rather than differences in substance.

JL: Yeah, it sounds like the attitude we take towards it is pretty similar even if maybe there’s a different philosophical basis… and maybe I’m incoherent at the end of the day, but I haven’t been shown it sufficiently to agree yet.

AB: Yeah it’s good to resist it for as long as you can! I was a libertarian once. I had this wonderful [friend]… I mentioned him in the introduction—John Winnie—in the acknowledgements at the beginning. He just gave me such a hard time that finally I said, John you’re right.

JL: Well I don’t talk to a lot of philosophers anymore so I get to just come up with whatever I want.

Deictic discourse, transhumanism, and Artificial Intelligence

JL: OK so moving on then. At the end of the day in your book you acknowledge in your later chapters that you are speaking, and people need to be speaking, “deictically” (or “paradeictically” in the case of being more philosophical), not “apodeictically” with what you call the cogency or the assent that’s forced by purely scientific reasoning. So if I were to try and state this another way, it sounds to me like you’re fundamentally assuming a certain mode of human essence and human flourishing, and not trying to substantiate that a priori but rather trying to live in it and reflect it, calling others into participation with it deictically.

AB: Absolutely

JL: So for me I’m very curious because of something that comes up a lot for me in conversations. I talk with a lot of people who are not necessarily transhumanist but they’re kind of Singularity people and whatnot. People who’d say that the term “human” is kind of whatever we make it, maybe in a similar sense as we talked about the term “meaning” or “significance” before. So in other words, to this concept of human flourishing, which you’re trying to speak about from your own kind of deep experience, I imagine someone else saying, “that’s great, and that seems to be what your definition of being human is. Mine is that I would like to extend my body with these bionic implants so that I have more working memory, so that I become more intelligent according to my understanding of what makes somebody human”. A lot of people say that working memory is what defines intelligence, and intelligence defines humanity, so the more working memory you have, the more intelligent you are, and the more human you are. They take this more or less mind-oriented definition. So is there anything you can say to these thinkers? Is a conversation possible? Or do you just have to accept that you’re on different planets?

AB: The question is whether intelligence is the essence of being human, right?

JL: Well I was giving that as an example. Somebody might have picked something else. I was just trying to highlight how it seems like you’re coming to the table with this understanding of what human flourishing consists in. Someone else might say (again like “meaning”) that you sort of choose what human flourishing means, and then you go with it.

AB: One thing I’m unclear about. Is there a proposal in there, or is it just a skeptical question? If the proposal is transhumanism, Kurzweil-type, it’s very specific, and it says the essence of humanty is an intelligence that is substance-neutral.

JL: So let’s take that as the foil. That’s something that people argue to me. I don’t know if they would choose it themselves, but being skeptics they’re bringing it up anyway.

AB: Lots of the things that were said before apply here too. It’s a question of empiricism. What is the case? And the question is, how do you get people into a position such that they see what is the case? I’ve written a paper about this, about the Turing Test. I posit that the program passes the Turing Test—and as you know it’s very far from ever doing so—so let’s just assume it and then the question that I pose is, what is it that would make us find that computer to be a commanding presence? Something that we find interesting, noteworthy. So what I’m doing is arguing that we’re supplying what exactly makes it a commanding presence. So we get these answers [from the computer as part of the Test], and we think, well there must be a person there. So I say let’s enrich it and enrich it and enrich it. So there’s not only the writing but also voice and so on. And enrich it and enrich it and enrich it and the argument finally says that at every point, if we stop at this stage of enrichment, we will not find that person to be enduringly interesting and worthy of respect.

What makes a person interesting to me is that the person has parents that I can ask the person about, and that they’re real parents, not just fake parents. That the person can suffer and prevail against suffering, and if the person is just faking suffering, I’ll find their “triumph” over suffering boring after a while. And then the person being capable of despair. And so the basic idea is that when you detail what it is that makes a person a commanding presence, something that you respect and turn to and hope for and call in the dark night of the soul… “Bill, you gotta come over…” The person has to be just the way we are. Someone who’s capable of believing, of possibly dying and some day really dying. A person who’s born, has parents… And so these computers that supposedly are just as smart as I am are just going to be boring to me after a while. Even though they can fake things…

JL: It might fool you but once you were revealed the truth it would eventually lose its commanding sense.

AB: Right. And people, unfortunately, are willing to supply this… “Her”, did you see “Her”?

JL: I still need to, I’ve heard about it. Or the elderly people with these robots, the caretaking robots that become sources of consolation, but like you’re saying it feels like they’re giving the robots “personhood” so they can receive back, not because it’s actually there.

AB: Yeah, they’re imagining. Again, empiricism comes in. And I’ve heard that the person who made this dog, the Japanese outfit… they stopped making it.

JL: I forget what it was called, there was a paper on this at SPT.

AB: So again, the empirical evidence I suspect will show that people get tired of it. Of course people can live with fantasies for a long time, but again it’s a social question. What’s going to happen broadly?

JL: And if society is already kind of empty enough of actual relationship, then an imaginary one, or… In China I read this article there’s a “girlfriend” app that is becoming really popular that will randomly text young men to make them feel as though they have a relationship. To me it’s pointing out how empty the culture is such that that could be a replacement. Not how rich that is in and of itself.

AB: And more than that I think my expectation is that people will get tired of it.

JL: Right, that it’s a momentary respite from despair.

AB: The sort of vacuity of the whole thing will become obvious to the persons who for a while are enchanted with it. And again we have to be careful with anecdotes. Anecdotes always dominate.

JL: Right, that’s what’s hard for me as somebody who’s trying to voice a dissenting opinion. You might say that the facts for a lot of these things aren’t really in yet. So I have the skeptical voice and other people have the very positive voice, and there’s always enough positive anecdotes that you can sort of skip from one to the other while ignoring the wreckage that lies at the end of each particular trajectory.

AB: There are, as I said, cases where the accumulating evidence is telling. With food, mental health, and people’s avowed unhappiness. So advocates of new technologies who take the kind of empiricist attitude I’m talking about as a concession can be countered by saying that there are lots of cases where if we didn’t know the social causality, we’d still be singing a device’s praises, like you with the Big Mac, right? But we no longer say that in some areas. And as I said, distraction will be the next example, then of course global warming. Although global warming is ambiguous morally speaking because as we said before it could be cured in a way that would not unhinge the Device Paradigm.

JL: It wouldn’t make us better people.

Continued in Part 4…

The relativism of technological change

JL: Albert, I’ve been talking about your ideas with pretty much everyone that has an ear, or half an ear, to listen. It’s gotten to the point where, with my group of friends and colleagues, any time a topic comes up that triggers philosophical conversation, they say “oh no, Jonathan’s about to talk about technology again!”

AB: What sort of work do you do?

JL: I’m a software developer. I’ve worked for the last fourG years at a tech startup, a cloud software company called Sauce Labs. We provide a cloud service for testing software applications. So it’s a service that people would rely on as a facility to make sure that their new software that they are releasing is high quality. I started as just a developer and I’m now in a management role so I don’t do a lot of software work. All this to say, most of the people I talk to about this are programmers.

Anyway, so I talk to a lot of people and I get a lot of responses about the ideas that I communicate, which I take largely from your work. It’s always a challenge to figure out how to elocute it. My initial tendency was to start at a kind of abstract level and talk about the Device Paradigm. Sometimes people get it and sometimes people don’t, but the inevitable question is, “So what? What does this framework have to do with anything?” I’ve tried different strategies, and I’ve heard a number of different responses and I want to ask you about a couple of these responses that I hear, to know what you would say about some of these things. One of the most common responses I hear is a version of what I call the “Douglas Adams argument for technological relativism”. He has a quote that a lot of people know. He calls this the rules that describe people’s reaction to technology.

• Rule 1: anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

• Rule 2: anythig that’s invented between when you’re 15 and 35 is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

• Rule 3: anything invented after you’re 35 is against the natural order of things.

In other words, when people bring this kind of response up to me, it seems like they’re interpreting what you’re saying as simply a common reaction that old people have to new things. “Oh, that’s unnatural!” When the telephone was invented, there were some old people that said, “That’s unnatural”, but now it’s the most normal thing, and we can even talk about talking on the phone with people nostalgically. But there was a class of people at some point who said, “That’s horrible, we’re not going to see each other face to face anymore”. So it’s a relativistic argument or maybe a slippery-slope type argument that’s designed to show that we shouldn’t be concerned about what seems unnatural now, because it will seem natural later. So really there’s nothing to be concerned about. I see your work as saying something deeper that’s not really susceptible to that argument but it’s hard to know how to frame that, so what would you say?

AB: The argument is bad, right? The chickens expect the farmer to feed them day after day, but one day the farmer comes and wrings their neck! So I think it’s a bad argument, but a better reply is perhaps to say that technological culture had culturally detrimental impacts. This used to be easily dismissed. The reply to the criticism was exactly what your colleagues say: “So what?” But now, for better or worse, we’re at a stage where the detrimental effects are just obvious, and the two are obesity (and other self-inflicted diseases, which are a terrible problem, and due to the Device Paradigm running amok) and global warming. So you can’t say, “Oh, 2/3 of the people were always overweight, and most of the diseases were self-inflicted”. That’s just not true! And you can’t say, “Oh well, nature can always absorb what we throw at it. It’s resilient”. Well, it’s not.

JL: So we’re sort of coming to the end of the line for that particular argument, where it’s shown to be false by experience.

AB: Right. And the next one is going to be distraction. The inability to focus on a demanding task. And distraction I think is going to be the mental counterpart to obesity.

JL: The result of mental fast food?

AB: Exactly. And so that’s just sort of breaching the wall. But then you have to go on and ask, is there something like the Good Life? Or is it just that all kinds of lives are equal? So all these stars O.D. and kill themselves; that’s ok! They’re going out the way they want to go out with the highest possible high. Or maybe it’s their children being totally aimless and not knowing what to do. I have at one time collected all the rueful columns just in the New York Times where people say, “There are terrible things happening to my children! What I’m doing to them is terrible, but I can’t help myself.” So is it all OK? And the thing about moral arguments is that a person can say, “Yes!”

JL: Right, but then their blood is on their own heads, essentially.

Technology, the Good Life, and happiness

AB: In a more recent book I say that you have to put people in (I forget how I phrased it) a benevolent, disinterested position. Benevolent: they’re people of good will. Disinterested: you’re not talking about them, because then they’re defensive. And how do you get them into that position? It’s when you ask them as parents, “What do you want for your children?” What kind of life? And then I make it a little more concrete by having a fairy godmother appearing and then asking questions, and then develop the notion of the Good Life following the traditional virtues of wisdom, courage, and friendship. Wisdom: knowledgeable, understanding the way the world works. Courage: physically active, at ease with their bodies. Friendship: warm, sustaining relationships. So would anyone say “Oh no, not my kid! I want my kid to be obese like everybody else! I want them to be ignorant!” You know? Google it if you want to know! And then you’re able to move people into a position that’s a little less flip and a little more thoughtful. They got sort of a glimpse of what the Good Life is, and then there’s good social science research that supports it… Have you heard of Martin Seligman? The book Authentic Happiness is a great convergence of social science and virtue ethics. When it comes to wisdom, education is a good thing for happiness. Then physical activity is good for happiness, and then of course warm and enduring social bonds are crucial to happiness.

JL: I think I see what you’re saying. He’s actually using data from social sciences to support a kind of virtue ethics perspective on the Good Life, and you see that as a good trend in that kind of research.

AB: Yeah, I think if you’re in the philosophy of society and culture you have to pay attention to the social sciences. You may just be wrong about claims that you make.

JL: You have to look at what’s actually happening in the world to inform your philosophy about what’s good for people or not good for people.

AB: The social scientists never ask exactly the questions you’d like them to ask, so you have to draw inferences and then of course you have to be critical of the social sciences. They’re often mistaken. But people definitely know when they’re miserable! So it’s not as though you can tell a person who’s terribly depressed, “You’re not really depressed.”

JL: Some people try, but they know.

AB: This gets us into complex issues. Professed happiness, avowed happiness. How valid is it? But social scientists have ways of establishing validity and reliability. And so if people say, “Yeah I’m happy”, then you go out there, ask their neighbors, look at them, see how they’re doing. You correlate their avowed profession of happiness with how they actually live. You know, there are kinds of happiness where people make distinctions between enduring happiness and momentary happiness and the sum of lots of momentary happiness is not the same as enduring happiness.

JL: Similar to the reaosn why hedonism has never made sense to me as a personal philosophy even though it’s the philosophy that pretty much everyone around us in San Francisco professes to follow, because ‘happiness’ is an empty category. It means whatever you want it to mean, so how can it be a guide to life? Basically everyone ends up saying you define pleasure in whatever way you want. Long-term, short-term. But I find it to be a meaningless guide to the Good Life in that sense.

AB: Right.

The possibility of focality in technological devices

JL: OK. I want to get back to some of these responses. Another response I hear after talking about some of your ideas with people, even if they’ll agree with the basic points, is that they view technological devices as having a lot more promise within themselves for meaning, for human meaning. Many of my colleagues believe that technological devices could become focal things or practices, so people talk about having more ‘real’ experiences with online communities than in their local physical environment, or getting extremely skilled at a video game that demands a lot of actual engagement and quasi-physical-but-intellectual skill. You think that chess might be a focal practice, so why not this video game? Or kinds of artistic expression that you can have with digital media that you couldn’t have with other kinds of things. Even in some of the research that I did for the paper I gave at the conference [ SPT 2015], talking about the open source software community in its early incarnation exhibiting some more “focal” features that then lessened as that community evolved. So what would you say about these possibilities for focality within something that we might in a large picture view as a technological device? Are these possibilities real? How do they compare to the kinds of focal things and practices in your book, like running and so on?

AB: It’s an empirical question, so we have to find out what the case is. The next thing is you have to distinguish between possibility and actuality. Possibilities instantiated anecdotally? Well great. But actuality is measured by what I would call “social causality”. What’s the broad impact of devices? There we depend on the social sciences. So what’s the broad impact of the availability of seductive, tempting food? You can say, “Well some people sit down with a Big Mac and for them it’s just a feast!” Fine. But what’s the broad impact?

JL: So you can acknowledge that possibility of that sacred experience with the Big Mac, but then you look at the broad strokes of what that does to culture, and it’s a different picture.

AB: Then you have to ask yourself, why that broad impact? What is it in the culture that makes the impact of engineered food so detrimental? And then I think you come to the conjunction of disburdenment and enrichment that is so seductive and still propelling the culture. What makes that kind of disburdenment and enrichment possible? It’s some sort of machinery. If people didn’t have the Device Paradigm writ large and instantiated in so many ways, that disburdenment wouldn’t be possible. Every person would have to have 1,000 slaves, and that’s not a culture we could accept. So these are the stages. The first is possibility vs actuality. And then, what’s the actuality? And then, why does it have this broad impact?

Continued in Part 3…

Intro & Reception of TCCL

Jonathan Lipps: Technology and the character of contemporary life. It’s a very long title, and hard to say! So I say “TCCL”. I thought it was an extremely profound book, and I’m curious as a newcomer to the field in the last 30+ years since you wrote it, what has its reception been, and what kind of debate has it generated?

Albert Borgmann: Well, there is actually a book titled Technology and the Good Life? which is a reflection of the early reception. It’s an anthology of comments. That was done by three young people who got excited about it, and since then it’s been… you know, people who write about philosophy of technology consider TCCL a book they should know. Of course you get pigeonholed after a while. The pigeonhole replaces detailed engagement with the book. I think the most rewarding and perhaps important impact was with people like you. Who’s Jonathan, you know? How did he come across that book? It’s widely scattered. For a while there was, as one of the contributors of the anthology said, sort of a Borgmann “school”. It’s still being read. It pops up in various places, among people who are not philosophers. So that’s very rewarding of course to find out. But in the large sense it didn’t make any difference to the culture. I can’t think of a book that has. Perhaps Michael Harrington, How the other half lives, something like this. That supposedly inspired the war on poverty.

JL: So you’re saying books generally don’t impact culture very much?

AB: No they don’t. There’s sort of the melancholy example of John Rawls’s Theory of Justice. This is one of two really important books of American philosphy in the 20th century. It took the academy by storm. The bibliography is probably 200 pages by now! In the last book that he supervised (although he was too ill to edit it himself) the editor says that John Rawls realizes that the country has been moving in the opposite direction from what he recommended. So if this fantastic book, so important and magisterial, didn’t make a dent in the culture, then all we can expect is that we sort of sow some seeds, you know, and it germinates here and germinates there. We should be grateful if that much happens.

JL: That sounds like a mature perspective!

JL: This is bringing up another question: who did you originally write it for? Who was the first audience you had in mind?

AB: Fellow philosophers. As you can tell having read it, it uses philosophical terminology, and I never wrote a book in that style again. I’m always surprised that people like you actually work their way through it. The books that i’ve written since are much more accessible.

JL: Well it took me a long time. And I have philosophical training.

AB: And what is your training?

JL: I got a bachelors and a masters in philosophy. So I was familiar with the terminology, but even so there was enough meat there that even being familiar with the terminology it took a long time to digest. It’s a short book but it probably took me a year or a year and a half to read through. I could only read in bits at a time.

AB: But it’s still I think the most widely read and most influential book of the ones that I’ve written. So that’s always surprised me. Even at the time when I wrote it, when I still tried to impress my colleagues (which I no longer do).

Affirmations and Retractions?

JL: So, again kind of looking at the expanse of time from then to now, you’ve obviously had a lot of time to reflect on the ideas that you put forth then. I imagine that some things you would say, yes, I continue to affirm this, maybe I affirm it even more. But what would you say has stood the test of time? Are there any things you would instead revise or rephrase?

AB: I unfortunately got it right the first time! You must know Hilary Putnam? Hilary Putnam glories in his changes. “What is Hilary thinking now?” people ask themselves. But if you got it right the first time, you can’t say “I changed my mind.”

JL: There are no more books you can write!

AB: I’ve tried to expand and elaborate it, and that’s essentially what I’ve done. In some ways it’s dated, the philosophy of science that I use. But I think I wouldn’t take anything back. One thing that might have been good is to use the term “commodification”. I talk about it, and I may have used “commodifying”, but “commodification” makes a good link to things that worry people. And so it’s a good entry, but that’s a very minor thing.

JL: It was on point enough for me to read it nigh on 30 years later and find enough in my experience to say, “this is something I’m going to pay attention to”. So I don’t disagree! But wanted to give you the opportunity to elaborate.

AB: Well, I didn’t foresee… I talk about computer technology which was just sort of beginning.

JL: Yeah, you talked about “the coming microelectronic revolution”

AB: Yeah, right. I think something that needs philosophical examination or articulation is the uncanny influence that ICT has on the culture. That something would have that pervasive and in many ways insidious force, I didn’t foresee. One thing I was sort of too optimistic about, and I would take back, is global warming. As you may remember, I extend the Device Paradigm to “spaceship Earth” and I say, people take care of their cars, they’ll take care of spaceship Earth! But they’re not. They may yet. And clearly, if they do, I think the major impetus will still be the Device Paradigm. So it’s not the people who want to go back to reality, who say let’s solve the problem by doing less and less and less by way of conquering and modifying and shaping.

JL: Yeah, now it’s more like, let’s figure out how to do more of that to save ourselves!

AB: There are people like that, and I think that’s the most hopeful development that I see. The problem is that all these hopeful developments in farmer’s markets, the craft industry, little shops like this that buck up against Starbucks, furniture makers, the bicycle people…

JL: The whole artisan movement.

AB: Yeah. It’s not getting critical mass culturally and politically speaking. And so it is boxing under its weight. I’m sort of waiting for that! Why don’t these people see that they’re doing the same thing at bottom and then assert their cultural, economic, and political power? But to get back to global warming and the Device Paradigm, it’s the people who have sort of bought in to the Device Paradigm who will continue to dominate the discussion. An interesting illustration of what happens is what happened to the term “sustainability”. That was sort of the purview of the environmentalists. And the Brundtland Report (she was the Prime Minister, I think, of Norway)… It’s another report on dangers and drawbacks of technology, and that we have to have sustainability. And the environmentalists got really angry because they felt that the term was co-opted, subverted. So that’s an illustration. As you know, technology never says “no, we’re not going to do that”. Rather technology always says “ok, what’s the problem? We’ll solve it”. So the tendency unfortunately is that technology will co-opt the forces of reform and renewal. That’s a good thing. We’ll be better off if the Device Paradigm serves or aids in reducing or stopping (eventually) global warming than not.

JL: But it doesn’t mean that we won’t do the same thing with some other planet that doesn’t have the same problems. What I’m hearing is that it’s always in response to a problem that can be defined rather than proactively thinking about forestalling a problem in the first place.

AB: Well, who knows what’s going to happen. There are three scenarios. The worst is we’ll just continue like this. And leave your and my distant offspring a terrible, terrible planet. That’s the worst. The second best and second worst is that people will continue the way they live except they will use little electric cars instead of SUVs, but they’ll still be riding around, isolated…

JL: We’ll increase efficiency so we’ll have the same lifestyle with less cost.

AB: Exactly. That’s the second worst and the second best. If that happens, even a person I greatly admire like Barack Obama, that’s sort of the way he sees it. Fine. Great. It’s a lot better than the worst. But the best would be that people would say, we have to do two things. One, save the planet, and also lead a better life.

JL: To have a sort of spiritual, cultural revolution.

AB: Right. And my hope is that that will happen. And of course it doesn’t have to be one or the other.

JL: So ultimately, going back to our entree into this rabbit trail, you were saying you were maybe a little bit too optimistic that we were going to be following that best option, and now you’re wondering if maybe that’s not as realistic?

AB: Well, I advocate for it, I hope for it, and devoutly wish it’s going to happen that way. But as you remember there’s one thing I called the “unwarranted optimism of the pessimists”. Things might have to get so bad that people have to be good. Technological structures might have to collapse. And I don’t think that’s going to happen. So we can’t predict, with a sort of satisfaction, that “people will come to us”.

JL: We can’t be self-righteous that everything will come crashing down and that people will see, because as you put it the Paradigm is pretty resilient, pretty strong. It seems to have the resources within itself to cope with these kind of inner stability problems.

The Explosion of the Internet

JL: OK, let’s move on. Something that I think a lot about: the most obvious (to me) since the time you wrote is the explosion of the Internet, online culture. More and more our entire lives are being orchestrated using the Internet as a medium for that. So how would you extend the arguments you made in your book to apply to the Internet? Or more generally I’m interested to hear you comment on this successor to the microelectronic revolution that you talk a little bit about.

AB: Well, I think it’s the intensification of the Device Paradigm. So the machinery has become totally impenetrable. The Volkswagen disaster is an example.

JL: I haven’t heard about that. What happened?

AB: VW put software into their diesel cars that senses when it’s being tested, and then kicks in the pollution control. But as soon as the sensor tells it you’re on the road again, it’s turned off! And they spew 40 times the amount of nitrous oxide. It took people 6 years to nail it, because there are proprietary barriers, and just the sophistication of the software and the way it’s concealed in a chip. The opacity of the world is just tremendous. The kind of disburdenment is also tremendous. The Internet of Things is an important step because you’re using ICT, but here’s Jonathan, here’s the ICT, and you know you’re using it. But in the Internet of Things, you know, the Internet of Things would have known that you guys liked coffee, so my house, being smart, would have known that. And my house would have somehow found out that you’re going to be here at 3, so it would have made coffee, and so all the little interchanges we had about how to grind it, and all that, would be gone! And for all I know it would have put the dogs in the kennel. The disburdenment is becoming so radical as to be ludicrous! You can only marvel at the force of the Device Paradigm. It just continues and continues. It looks around for the last things that can be commodified!

JL: I know! I have this question later but talking about Internet of Things… I live in a town where people are working in the Internet of Things and every day a new startup is created. It seems like an effort to proactively turn everything into a device pre-emptively. We don’t even have this burden yet, we don’t even know that it’s burdensome, but let’s go out there and pre-emptively relieve that burden before people even realize it’s a burden!

AB: Right. That was Steve Jobs’s genius. He had a sense of that.

JL: Before people knew what they wanted to be freed from, yeah.

The Acceleration of the Device Paradigm

JL: So yeah, thanks for that response. One other thing that struck me as you were talking about the opacity going to infinity. Also the configurability of the surfaces can be achieved nearly instantaneously. With the devices that you considered in your book, things like TVs and what not, they at least take some effort to manufacture the next generation of. But with the Internet, with a site like Facebook, it will push a new version of itself hundreds of times a day. So it’s almost like this evolution that you pointed out of things becoming less burdensome, more “pure surface”, less “inner workings”… It’s a continual thing now because the cost to change it, with everything being software, is so low. So it feels like we’ve reached some point where, since we’ve sold the entire workings of our lives to software, it’s very easy for the Device Paradigm to go as fast as it wants. Do you see that kind of thing happening?

AB: Absolutely. One thing I also see is that there is a need to articulate it in a new way… essentially the Device Paradigm 2.0. This sort of gradual, step-by-step, invisible change. The whole way that the Internet informs the way that we see the world. It’s crucial that somebody articulates this and then you’d have to hope that would become part of the common discourse. Apple has come out with the iPhone 6 or whatever. The reports are invariably supportive, and if they’re critical, they’re not critical of the idea of an iPhone.

JL: It’s just the things that aren’t working quite perfectly yet.

AB: Yes. In a lot of other reporting, the economy say, the military, policies and so on, there is sort of the addition that says, “critics, however say…”. That never comes!

JL: No one is a critic of technology.

AB: The critics are the columnists who sort of ruefully report on how they suffer and lose things, or aren’t feeling well. It gets this sort of sporadic and anecdotal attention, but it does not have a firm place in the culture.

JL: It’s a kind of rearguard action.

AB: Yes. There’s a need there, and philosophers, of course, are missing in action. The philosophy of technology now is sort of veering towards analytic philosophy so it’s always this intramural discussion. Little things.

JL: Yes, that was my experience of going to the Society of Philosophy of Technology conference.

Continued in Part 2…

Technology promised us liberty and prosperity, but in significant ways this has not come to pass. In the industrialized nations we are free from hunger, disease, and illiteracy, but increasingly, commodities overflow in the center of our lives and we have become shallow people. We take pride in our technological means without caring much about what they are for. We have created genuinely amazing technological devices, but being human is about more than that. We must go beyond freedom from disease (the negative freedom that technology has provided) to engaging with life.

Within the technological paradigm, the kind of life we have embarked on instead is trivial, bored, over-entertained, over-stimulated and under-engaged, surly, unimpressed, and routinized. The reform we want to see takes technology and gives it back a supporting role in the human drama. Engagement with focal things and practices, and the manifold ways such engagement graces us, is what should occupy our center. We’re not talking about returning to pre-technological life, or convincing others to be anti-technological, but rather living a life that understands the place of technology and consciously limits it for the sake of something better.

In this arrangement, focal concerns are even more beautiful than we could see in pre-technological areas, and technology attains a new nobility by supporting these concerns rather than usurping their place. What’s the fate of this imagined reform of technology? What’s the fate of technology itself? Well, we can measure the success of the reform by the degree to which focal concerns grow and flourish in our society. And of course technology itself is not going to disappear. On the potential of reform, Borgmann is not anxious, and I’ll end this series by quoting the final words from his book:

One would rightly be nervous about the possibility that a great thing may fail accidentally, that the kingdom may be lost for want of a nail. But our focal concern will languish or prosper for essential reasons. I hope it will prevail, and it sustains my hope.

[Photo: Death Valley bloom, by the author]

We come finally to the last substantive chapter in Borgmann’s essay on technology. It also happens to be the longest, so buckle up! The question is: can the reform of technology, so vividly imagined as “wealth” defined by focal concerns in the previous chapter, be taken out of private life into the public sphere, ultimately changing the very heart of the systems that we have so little power over as individual citizens?

One option would be to press for legislating morality, arguing that technological reform is really moral reform that should be encoded in the legality or illegality of individual behaviors. This is what conservatives generally try to do in other spheres. But Borgmann points out, echoing his thoughts in Chapter 14, that “morality”, especially traditional morality, is a less commanding force in the lives of most citizens than conservatives usually estimate, even as a concept. (And of course it doesn’t help conservatives that they often undercut their moral argument by trying to outlaw certain types of supposedly immoral individual behavior while simultaneously promoting clearly unjust and immoral economic policies that have wide-ranging negative impact). In other words, this strategy would be paternalistic, harmful, and ultimately self-refuting (according to the norms of deictic discourse).

And it is in fact in the laws of the economy that Borgmann thinks we have the greatest opportunity to effect real change. What does economic reform that leads to technological reform look like? It begins with convincing the public that the “quality of life” and the “standard of living” are not one and the same. As a society our economic policies have been focused on the standard of living (as measured by the production and possession of commodities) as a proxy for quality of life, but in fact this is a bad proxy, as the previous chapter showed. We thought that “affluence” was what technology promised us, but it turned out to be hollow, a never-ending escalator of commodity consumption. Instead, Borgmann’s concept of (non-material) “wealth” is what truly leads to higher quality of life. Thus we need to convince the public to focus on quality of life at the expense of the standard of living, to argue that economic policies which promote such a view are a good trade.

How is such convincing even thinkable? How do we take the world of focal concerns (private, deictic discourse) into the world of labor and politics (public, political discourse)? We can’t impose some “national focal concern”. We can’t remake society on the model of pre-technological production; at this point there’s no getting rid of technology, in the background of production at least. Individual focal concerns could bubble up naturally through the disparate care and passion of individual citizens, but what about an actual public discourse? What will help is to bring to light the pattern of technology (what this book has been about) and talk about it. But in terms of actual change, again only deictic discourse will sway the public’s heart. And so far we’ve only seen deictic discourse effective in more private arenas, about the majesty of private pursuits like running and so on.

Part of the problem again lies in how the pattern of liberal democracy is set up. Public deictic discourse would expose the world to some kind of moral critique or evaluation, and liberal democracy is organized so that such critique is kept out of the public sphere. The legal system is idealized as amoral, like a technological device, at least in terms of how it understands itself (of course, it smuggles moral considerations in through the back door by tacitly specifying a concrete vision of the good life, as Borgmann discussed in earlier chapters). So we come back to the earlier question: how could economic reform be possible, given the challenges inherent in public deictic discourse?

Without getting into the professional economic implementation details, we can say that it begins with the philosophy of economics, which is currently complicit with the technological paradigm in its singular focus on the “standard of living” or affluence (paralleling the Device Paradigm’s focus on “availability”), falsely narrowing the scope of the good life. Lester Thurow has said, “Man is an acquisitive animal whose wants cannot be satiated. This is not a matter of advertising and conditioning but a basic fact of existence” (231). Thus the justification of acquisitiveness as the fulcrum of economic philosophy. But Borgmann points out that this doesn’t accord with what we actually know of the greater part of human history, where, once basic needs were satisfied, time was spent in non-acquisitive activities like play or celebration.

In reality, our society has a lot of economic margin to consider reform. We’ve proved this by enduring recessions and spending exorbitant amounts of money on military activities, all without substantially reducing the standard of living (at least in aggregate; of course the burden of recessions falls disproportionately on the poor). What could convince us to scale back our rabidly consumptive spending? Focal practices! As we saw in the previous chapter, focal practices subvert the individual’s race to affluence. (This is the deictic discourse of “wealth” vs “affluence” in general, not a discussion of this or that focal practice.)

So it seems possible to engage the public in this way. But do people actually want reduced affluence to attain “wealth” in Borgmann’s sense? Studies do suggest a general willingness to cultivate a “simpler” lifestyle, but maybe this is purely aspirational. What we need is a “collective affirmation” on a societal level, like we have in cultural norms of politeness (on the invisible end of the spectrum) or in the Constitution (on the formal end of the spectrum). Borgmann thinks we already have a sense of the tension between “quality of life” and “standard of living” in the form of the tension between considering public goods to be indicative of economic success in our country versus a standard of measurement like the GNP. Here, “public goods” parallels “quality of life”, and “GNP” parallels “standard of living” (a much simpler financial measure, to be sure, than the value public goods like infrastructure, water, parks, public spaces, etc… provide).

Transitioning to a model of economic success built on top of the quality of life would inevitably entail a certain shrinkage of the technological machinery at the heart of our industrialized society, but not by orders of magnitude. Many people would still work in the maintenance of said machinery, or would perhaps have no work at all. But what about work, which has been the cornerstone of meaningful engagement with the world up until the Industrial Revolution? We already see people who don’t strictly have to work returning to artisan-style pursuits—bakers, potters, metalworkers, etc… And Borgmann sees in this an opportunity for the institution of a two-sector economy.

We already have a two-sector economy, really: mega-corps on one hand and small businesses on the other. They represent two systems: the “planning system” and the “market system” respectively. The planning system operates basically according to the technological pattern of availability, and so they grow in tandem, taking over more and more of the market system. Borgmann wants to see us create space for those who do “engaging work”, even if people choose that work because their previous roles have been made redundant by technical automation. Engaging work is not about eliminating technology entirely, but about technology moving to the background so that the work itself can be in the center:

Engaging work is largely dependent on [technology] for tools, machines, energy, materials, transportation, and communication. But it will not adopt technological devices indiscriminately. The criterion will be whether a device is helpful or detrimental to a worker’s skill and to the focal depth of the work." (239)

So we want to see a two-sector economy where the production of certain goods like food, furniture, clothing, health care, education, arts instruction, etc…, is entrusted to local, labor-intensive industries (where “engaging work” happens). The “planning system” or a centralized industrial economy would then take care of infrastructural goods like transportation, utilities, communication, as well as the tools and materials required by the other sector, insurance, finance, and R&D. Technology would live on here as the context for the former sector, not the center of our lives. We would encourage this economy not by imposing quotas or embargoes on the planning system, but rather by giving tax credits or breaks to the local, labor-intensive sector so that they become competitive in the market for their goods. Of course, there are lots of potential problems with this sketch, but the basic ingredients are there, as long as we are willing to accept a reduction of overall affluence to subsidize these quality-of-life improvements.

Borgmann closes the chapter by exploring two concrete political issues as examples of how we could engage on a political level to help the cause of technological reform: the plight of large cities and social justice. He shows how the technological pattern has been instantiated in these parts of life to detrimental effect (the urban/suburban distinction mirrors the labor/leisure distinction, for example), and how a public focus on quality of life rather than affluence would serve to forestall the disintegration of civic life and the reduction of social justice. He wants to see public structures “opened up”, i.e., made intelligible and inviting for us to engage with. The artifacts of our technological substructure like dams, power plants, office buildings, etc…, could be redesigned so that they are not opaque, intimidating, or lifeless, and instead invite curiosity and understanding. Likewise we need memorable places in the sense of places that allow engagement, not just passive enjoyment (cf. the fate of churches or cathedrals in so many European cities). We need, as he says, an “enactment of culture”—spaces designed for the focal concerns of sports, music, arts, worship, and work.

Social injustice is a more visible problem. Borgmann laid out the problem in Chapters 13 - 16: liberal democracy has allowed the broad middle class to tacitly specify a definition of the good life that is actually complicity with technological consumption. Social injustice has become the hidden injustice that allows that consumption to continue. If the middle class were to care more about quality of life than the standard of living (affluence), and is able to seek after wealth of engagement via focal concerns, then that wealth is open to everyone in a way that affluence was not. There is no more need for the moving escalator that keeps classes forever divided. And of course letting go of affluence as the end goal means that there is more likelihood that money, the means by which the lower classes might achieve a basic quality of life, won’t just pool together, locked in the upper echelons.

In sum, Borgmann thinks that the path to political affirmation of the reform of technology is this: deictic discourse leads to collective affirmation, which leads to a two-sector economy focused on quality of life and engaging work, which can lead to a reform of the cities and bring about greater economic justice. At that point we’ll have begun a true and lasting reform of technology—not eliminating it, but putting it in its place as the servant of the good life.

[Photo: Athens, by the author]

As we saw in the last chapter, Borgmann thinks focal things and practices (gathered together under the heading of ‘focal concerns’) are central to the kind of reform of technology we need. In this and the next chapter, he wants to (a) defend focal concerns from any philosophical worries, and (b) show how focal concerns constitute the kind of reform of technology that we need. This chapter looks at focal concerns on a personal level, and so connects them up with a reform of technology in our personal, more than our public, lives. This is why the name of this chapter is “Wealth and the Good Life”: focal concerns constitute “wealth”, and lead to the much-sought-after “good life” that technology has been promising to us but failing to deliver.

The main philosophical worry about focal concerns as presented in the last chapter is their plurality. I take it that Borgmann sees two potential problems under this heading:

1. We have to ask: is it even possible to figure out what all the focal things and practices out there have in common? Is there, in other words, some kind of necessary and sufficient definition we can give of what focal concerns are? If not, then it appears on the surface that Borgmann’s idea of focal concerns may not be formulated clearly enough to bear the weight of technological reform.
2. What about the sheer diversity of focal concerns? Doesn’t this bring up issues around which concerns are to be considered more or less focal? If my focal concern is so grounding and enriching in my life, won’t I be forced (out of genuine sympathy) to attempt to convert others away from their focal concerns and over to mine? How can a bunch of varied practices (even if we can answer the first problem above) present a unified front when it comes to technological reform?

We might say that these are the ‘philosophical’ and ‘practical’ problems of plurality for focal concerns.

Let’s take the ‘philosophical’ problem first. What could philosophically tie focal concerns together? Borgmann examines what he takes to be the most likely candidate, in the form of John Rawls’ ‘Aristotelian Principle’, which says that the excellence of our life is determined by the complexity of the faculties that we develop. In other words, the more complex skills we cultivate, the more we partake of ’excellence’ (something Borgmann definitely cares about as well in the context of focal concerns). Could this principle suffice to capture what we mean by ‘focal concerns’? Let’s examine a few examples: on this view, people should prefer chess to checkers because chess is more complex and demanding. Likewise people would prefer checkers to watching TV, for the same reason.

So far, so good. But when we come to examine technology, it seems the principle loses some of its bite: complexity is in no way a counterforce to technology. Couldn’t technological devices (like highly targeted workout machinery) be more ‘complex’ than their analog equivalents? Isn’t a machine that allows individual muscle groups to be sensed and worked with precision more complex than the simple act of walking or running? So it appears the Aristotelian Principle as it stands does not capture what is essential about the difference between technological devices and focal concerns. Could it be extended, though? Let’s take the contrast between a great chef or a great runner and a fast food junkie or a treadmill enthusiast. What is different between the two sets? Well, the difference is engagement. The chef and the runner are fully (mentally, physically, perhaps even spiritually) engaged with their activity, whereas the fast food junkie is merely consuming, and the treadmill runner is merely using their body for some extraneous end (fitness). So perhaps ’engagement’ can replace ‘complexity’ as the philosophical essence of focal concerns?

Unfortunately, we run into problems here as well. Borgmann envisions a fan of computer games arguing that their games are just as engaging as something Borgmann takes to be a paradigmatic focal practice, e.g., fly-fishing. And nowadays, thirty years after TCCL was published, we would in some cases find ourselves hard-pressed to deny this (take for example the meteoric rise of eSports and the high level of training, dedication, strategy, and teamwork involved in professional video gaming). So our problem is this: it seems on the surface at least that ’engagement’ can be technological, but all along we have said that focal concerns are meta-technological.

One way out is to say that technological engagement is only apparent, not real. We could argue that they are one-dimensional in that they don’t connect us to the wider physical universe of which we are a part. A computer game does not (in the way other mental practices like musical composition or poetry do) gather together some meaningful aspect of reality and present it to us in a new and engaging way. The reply to this would then be that games do help us connect with a deeper reality—the reality of the computer world. Borgmann thinks this is disingenuous in that he sees being at home in the ‘computer world’ as equivalent to being at home with the device paradigm’s pattern of commodity consumption. But what about computer engineers themselves? Aren’t they in touch with something deeper than their users might be? Indeed hardware or software engineering is often practiced as art for art’s sake (something I know full well, being a software engineer myself). And Borgmann grants that, “inasmuch as computers embody and illuminate phenomena such as intelligence, organization, determination, decidability, system, and the like, they surely have a kind of focal character, and a concern with computers in that sense is focal as well.” But he goes on to say, “the focal significance of work with computers seems precarious to me and requires for its health the essentially complementary concern with things in their own right. Otherwise the world is more lost than comprehended” (217). In other words, focal things in the computer world are not strong enough to grace us in their own right, something we appreciate in the more traditional kind of focal things and practices Borgmann has discussed so far.

On this point, Borgmann does ask in passing this important question: can a device ever become a focal thing, “one that, whatever its genesis, has taken on a character of its own, that challenges and fulfills us, that centers and illuminates our world?” We can’t know for certain, he says; we will have to wait and see. But for the time being that is no reason to abandon the focal things that are still in front of us! Anyway, it appears that we have exhausted the search for a philosophical unity behind focal concerns that truly captures what is distinct about them. What about the other problem, the ‘practical’ problem of focal concern plurality?

The problem, again, is that fly-fishing and running can’t both matter in the most ultimate sense. In pre-technological times, this was not a problem because it was only the religious life that mattered in the most ultimate sense—every other focal concern was arranged underneath it. But eventually the primacy of the church’s control over our understanding of reality was dissolved, in the course of various reform movements, the scientific revolution, the rise of democracy, and finally technology itself. We have begun to see the actual world as one out of a great range of possible states of affairs.

Borgmann’s first response to the issue of plurality of focal concerns in this regard is to say that perhaps this isn’t so much a problem for the theory as it is for us. The fact that George Sheehan’s focal practice is running rather than music implies not a deficiency in music enthusiasts but in Sheehan himself! As he says: “When a musician tells me Beethoven’s Opus 132 is not simply an hour of music but of universal truth, is in fact a flood of beauty and wisdom, I envy him. I don’t label him a nut” (213). We must understand that no one person can realize everything we as humans are capable of when it comes to focal experiences. But by cultivating our own focal practices we can join with the rest of humanity by contributing our own experience. In other words, we can see this plurality of concerns positively rather than negatively.

Ultimately, Borgmann thinks the plurality problems are not really problems for focal concerns. Still, it would be nice to be able to discern affinities between them, not as a way of describing a cogent philosophical umbrella per se, but as a set of ‘family resemblances’ that help us to say, with regard to a particular thing or practice we are considering, “Aha! Now that looks like a focal concern!” (Likewise, religion is still available as an umbrella concern, and no doubt for many people it is very effective in ordering their other focal practices, but Borgmann assumes for the time being that we will not find a generally-accepted umbrella concern like this that can serve as the basis for public reform of technology, given the fundamental pluralism of religious views in our country.) What we can say regarding focal concerns is this: “A focal practice, generally, is the resolute and regular dedication to a focal thing. It sponsors discipline and skill which are exercised in a unity of achievement and enjoyment, of mind, of body, and the world, of myself and others, and in a social union” (219). So, how does this understanding of focal concerns lead to a reform of technology (remembering from previous chapters that what we need is a reform of the paradigm, not a reform from the paradigm)?

Well, on one hand, it would not look like a restructuring of the Device Paradigm itself. The Device Paradigm can’t really be restructured because it is already perfectly architected according to the terms it takes to be valid. I.e., the process of taking goods and making them progressively more ‘available’ (in Borgmann’s technical sense) can’t be improved upon. Any failure is deemed to be a failure of availability, and that is precisely what the Paradigm is constantly working to achieve. On the other hand, it would also not look like the dismantling of technology itself. But what it would look like is the " recognition and restraint of the paradigm," restricting it from access to the sphere of focal concerns. Technology becomes no longer the dominant, unrecognized, default way of being, but one that we can take up and put down in a new maturity.

How does this look in practice? Well, someone whose focal practice is running might still acquiesce to using a car to drive to work; i.e., they would not insist on running everywhere. And, consonant with the Device Paradigm, they would want their car to be safe, fast, and so on (in addition to being as environmentally-friendly as possible, given their love for the outdoors, etc…). But when it comes to the focal practice itself, they would leave the car behind. Engagement with running would not take place on the terms of the Device Paradigm. In other words, focal practices engender a selective attitude with regard to technology, not a wholesale adoption of it. Technology is relegated to a place of lesser importance in our lives, and only judiciously allowed into the foreground. People whose focal things have radiated out from their surroundings and into their lives might appear quixotic or quaint to others, and this must be accepted, in the face of a culture that values mainly the display of commodities.

Of course, this attitude could also lead to an overzealous self-sufficiency or insistence on a do-it-yourself methodology, wherein life becomes so full of the preparation for focal things that the things themselves and their enjoyment are not to be found. Imagine people who are constantly buying backpacking gear but never going outside, or constantly remodeling their home but never enjoying it. At some level, Borgmann says, we must, while holding on to our criticality, allow technology to do its job of disburdening us, to “allow celebration and world citizenship to prosper in the time that has been gained” (222). Our lives can benefit from the fruits of technology while not being ensnared by the deadening commoditization that the Device Paradigm brings, or by the endless cycle of labor for leisure’s sake. Focal practices allow us to put technology in its proper place. And this is where we get the idea that they constitute ‘wealth’ for us:

Such a life is centrally prosperous, of course, in opening up a familiar world where things stand out clearly and steadily, where life has a rhythm and depth, where we encounter our fellow human beings in the fullness of their capacities, and where we know ourselves to be equal to that world in depth and strength. (223)

This is very different than ‘affluence’, the possession of many commodities. This kind of wealth will be connected with politics and economics in the next chapter, but for now we connect it to the private sphere, with the traditional concepts of ’excellence’ (cashed out in terms of world citizenship, gallantry, musicianship, and charity), and ‘family’.

• World citizenship: within the technological paradigm we learn about our world from a firehose of too much information, shredded into colorful bits of data and delivered in as entertaining a way as possible. We need a center from which to appropriate the world; we cannot comprehend it from the disembodied ’nowhere’ that is the Internet. Focal things can help give us that grounding.
• Gallantry: Borgmann defines ‘gallantry’ today as the fitness of our bodies for greatness and for responding to the playfulness of the world. Technology has co-opted the depth of this idea and turned physical fitness into something which is sheer surface: the cultivation of a perfect body in appearance, achievable by science, diets, conforming to norms of fashion, etc… Focal practices can help us rediscover what it is to be fit, not for the sake of appearance or according to an external standard, but as a way of engaging with the world through running, hiking, etc…
• Musicianship: this virtue has survived somewhat unscathed in the transition to a technological world, and retains connections with traditional excellence. However, technology commoditizes it, makes it available in a way that cheapens the practice of making music. So wealth in this area will look like reminding ourselves of the treasure that music actually is, restraining our consumption of it so as to appreciate the focal practice that results in transcendental live performances in the company of others.
• Charity: our technological society is depressingly self-oriented, and we have by and large lost touch with the virtue of charity. Focal practices can help us encounter life in a more raw way, one where we are not simply given what we want, which helps us to grow in empathy. Technological citizens are so disengaged as to be calloused by default. Deliberately choosing to live more simply would put us in touch with the plight of others, whom technology does not benefit as it has us.
• Family: as we discussed in Chapter 18, the modern family has been disintegrated by technology. One consequence is that it has left parents with nothing to do in the service of raising their children. Focal practices allow families to share in an engaging pursuit and form traditions. They give the parents something meaningful to impart. And of course they enable the possibility of enjoyable shared experiences.

This was just a sketch of how this life of ‘wealth’ generated by focal concerns can begin a reform of the technological paradigm, not by destroying technology or banishing it out of our lives, but by refusing to let it take the place of what is ultimately meaningful for us. In the next chapter, we will carry these ideas forward into the realm of politics, the public sphere of engagement, and see how a reform of technology in that sphere would benefit not just us as individual persons but society as a whole.

[Photo: Badlands, taken by the author]

The previous chapter took Nature as an intuitive source of helpful challenges to the technological paradigm. But Borgmann’s insight, spelled out in his concept of “focal things and practices”, is that what is true about Nature can be explored in a more general fashion. Moreover, Borgmann actually thinks that technology, while it can be a challenge to what we find meaningful in life, for that very reason heightens its beauty. We therefore don’t need to be pessimistic about its survival; we just need to pay attention to how and where we can cultivate focal things and practices despite the challenge that goes along with such effort.

So, what is a focal thing or practice? First of all, what is ‘focus’? We can find two senses of it: the first is from the Latin word for ‘hearth’, where we can see a focus as that which gathers social reality and arranges it around itself. The other sense is later, meaning the “burning point of a lens or mirror”, in other words, where optical lines converge. As Borgmann says, “Figuratively they suggest that a focus gathers the relations of its context and radiates into its surroundings and informs them. To focus on something or to bring it into focus is to make it central, clear, and articulate” (197).

Examples of focal things are not hard to find, and extend beyond the wilderness: music, gardening, the culture of the table, and running constitute a few. We might intuitively understand that these are ‘focal’ in some sense, but we’d all have to agree that they are scattered and disparate, totally unlike the focal things of pre-technological times, like temples, which had a place of physical and cultural prominence (in addition to “focusing” the divinity of their surroundings into one structure).

For Heidegger, this role of the temple—gathering in and disclosing the givenness of its surroundings—is central to art and historical existence. Technology, on the other hand, is for him a metaphysical development that deals in pure conditionality—what might (or might not) be the case in whatever circumstance. Conditionality (potential realities based on lawlike extrapolations of variable states of affairs) is totally different from givenness (what truly is). Heidegger tried to recover this givenness, finding it in simple, concrete artifacts like an earthenware jug. A simple jug by its shape and purpose discloses what it means to hold as well as to give. It gathers together sky, earth, rain, and grape together in the wine it serves, revealing them to us, teaching us about refreshment and invoking the divine (via the tradition of libations, or something else).

While Borgmann is sympathetic to this way of thinking, he fears that we moderns have lost the ability to listen to earthenware jugs the same way we have discarded temples; outside of a very specific set of circumstances, a jug will just be a jug, and a temple a building. What is essential is to uncover the pattern of technology, to perceive its central emptiness, so that focal things regain a place in our ontology, where they had before been crowded out. Moreover, we need to go beyond focal things to practices, and to an engagement with society and politics, which of course is where things themselves exist. Essentially, we need through a cultivation of focal practices and political engagement to strip the gag from focal things and allow them to have a voice in deictic discourse.

Now to more examples. Nature was a good one! What about one that’s “closer to home”? Borgmann examines two in the course of the chapter: running and the culture of the table. He picks these in part because he believes that we have all experienced in some way or another the feeling of a run (or at least a brisk walk), and a simple good meal at home in the presence of good company, and that we will understand the contrast between them and sitting indoors for weeks, or grabbing a quick meal from a fast-food chain.

Unfortunately running outside and homemade meals are nowadays fleeting experiences. Philosophers, politicians, and technologists have not developed them as part of a wider discourse. Instead, practitioners (the runners themselves, for example) have been the ones who have been witnesses of the focal power of these practices. This is excellent, as far as Borgmann is concerned, for these people can actually speak deictically to us! Melville, Thoreau, Pirsig, and Maclean are all helpful. Even instruction manuals for hiking or backpacking can have strikingly deep philosophical reflection and insight.

For running, Borgmann chooses George Sheehan’s Running & Being to bear the torch. Running is different than driving. In both activities we can say we have ‘achieved’ something, but in driving it is the technological achievement of having extracted stored energy from the earth, which of course I had no particular hand in making happen. I can’t really take any credit for it even though I benefit. “I am a divided person; my achievement lies in the past, my enjoyment in the present. But in the runner, effort and joy are one; the split between means and ends, labor and leisure is healed” (202). Running engages the mind and body, which is different from “exercise”, which works the body while leaving the mind disengaged. Running on a treadmill is an efficient, disassociating kind of activity in which I use my body while doing the best I can not to be bored, often by watching TV or listening to music—a perfect example of a ‘divided person’. In outdoor running, mind and body are intimate with the world. We know the world more deeply by running through it than driving past it in an enclosed cage. Not only that, “serious running takes us to the limits of our being” (204) through encountering the pain of effort and working with our bodies.

Another example of a focal practice is the “culture of the table”, i.e., cultivating homemade meals accompanied by conversation in the presence of others. Because of our technological capabilities or our human uniqueness, we often stand over or against the world; coming into immediate contact with the world is therefore something special, and this happens in a meal: “Truly human eating is the union of the primal and the cosmic. In the simplicity of bread and wine, of meat and vegetable, the world is gathered” (204). The great meal is a focal event which gathers the family and the gifts of nature and delivers them to us in the flow of our unique culinary traditions, recollecting our ancestral research into food and our particular branch of humanity’s customs. Technological eating is divided into form and function; in a festive family meal, eating once again engages us fully.

Borgmann acknowledges that in the course of any meal there is an element of sheer consumption. In the great meal, that is only part of the structure, however; there is also a moment of reflection (or prayer), a sequence of courses, memorable conversation, all clothed with the desire to respect one another and the event via the discipline of table manners. Activities are embodied in persons—the dish and cook, the vegetable and gardener, etc… This meal is not characterized by consumption and anonymity. It could even be called religious, or sacred (and many special traditional meals have that character explicitly).

In our technological setting, the great meal is necessarily understood differently than in a pre-technological one; for us, rather than it being the necessary way of things, it can become something more: a place of calm, of memory. A place where there is respite from the striving for consumption and a restoration of the depth of the world.

Engaging in focal practices like running or cultivating homemade meals is clearly possible for all of us to do (even if only because our technological society has given us that opportunity!). Everyone can run or make a meal from scratch. So why don’t we, as a society? Well, first of all, our labor—that which we spend most of our time doing—is exhausting. When we return home from it, it’s easy to say “yes” to the least burdensome diversion that approaches us (e.g., TV). And so ultimately the rule of technology, which we have been examining all these chapters, is stronger than any ad hoc willpower we might possess. The whole framework of our world validates my desire to simply kick back in the easy chair and watch a movie, beer in hand. If we care about running or making meals from scratch, the only thing that will suffice is turning them into an actual practice, not a series of one-off events we hope will be the norm. Borgmann says, “…without a practice, an engaging action or event can momentarily light up our life, but it cannot order and orient it focally… Through a practice we are able to accomplish what remains unattainable when aimed at in a series of individual decisions and acts” (207).

How are focal practices established? In pre-technological societies, they were often done so with some mythic purpose or backstory, showing how this particular practice enacts something we all know or desire to be true cosmically, for example as in the Eucharist, a practice established to commemorate not just a specific event but the cosmic reality that event signified: God giving himself for the world. Practices were established in the face of some obvious antagonist, like chaos (thinking, “if we but keep this practice it will keep chaos and disorder at bay”). Our antagonist today is the deadening effect of technology, but this antagonist is hard to see. It is the backdrop, the stage setting, not easily visible as a character itself. Unless we have seen its patterns and felt its debilitating effect on our lives, it will be hard to find energy to found focal practices in opposition to it. But if we have observed the “persuasiveness and consistency of its pattern”, we will be encouraged to engage in focal practices that restore depth and integrity to our lives.

Practices, in their recurring and faithful nature, protect focal things from being subverted by technology and from being lost because of our own frailty or natural inconsistency. Practices remind us that focal goods, far from being delivered automatically whenever we engage in the practice, are hard-won, and all the more satisfying for remaining in the practice despite difficulty or long seasons without apparent advancement. And as Alisdair MacIntyre says, a practice always contains the notion of the goods it obtains, so the technological split between means and ends is healed—the focal practice and focal good cannot be disentangled as with a machine and its product.

In sum, focal practices are essential to counteract the pattern of technology and to guard focal things from extinction. They come into being through either our explicit resolution or an implicit nurturing that becomes a solid custom. Our focal practices today will differ from those of our pre-technological ancestors. Theirs were social, public, and enshrined in buildings, public offices, roles, clothing, etc… Ours are more humble, homely, scattered, and often more private. This is a limitation of focal practices that we need to examine if, as Borgmann thinks, they can be the ground for a more widespread reform of technology that reaches into the public sphere. And so we set the stage for the next chapter, which will begin to tie together the notion of focal practices with the “good life”, and how that pushes inevitably into politics.

[Photo: breakfast at our table, by Jessica Lipps]

This chapter is a sort of case study or example of something we might start deictic discourse (the subject of the last chapter) about in a fruitful way. Borgmann thinks that, in North America, nature (specifically as “wilderness”) is possibly the most obvious place to start looking for focal concerns to discourse deictically about. We’ll first start with a brief history of attitudes towards North American wilderness, then discuss previous attempts by conservationists to involve the wilderness in public discourse, and finally explore a new understanding of wilderness from within the context of our technological society.

The initial view of wilderness was that, being wild, it was a terrifying place. It was something that was not good until it could be tamed into a garden. And early European settlers (or invaders, however you see them), after a brief flirtation with the idea of the New World as a beautiful Eden, eventually saw it as an empty land, waiting to be wrought into shape. Of course, the land wasn’t “empty” by any stretch, nor was it unsettled or uncultivated; civilizations and centuries-long relationships with land already existed, in the form of the Native Americans.

Anyway, while this view of wilderness as a chaotic void waiting to be tamed was pre-technological, it was certainly amenable to the technological approach once that came on the scene. The technological paradigm sees nature as something to be shaped, something to be used as a mere means, as a raw material. And this indeed became the mission, not so much of the pioneers, but of early American industry: to subdue the wilderness and turn it into something that could become part of the production of goods that benefit humankind. Whereas in the Old World there were much more long-lasting ties between humans and the lands they dwelled in, this more instrumental view of nature in the New World did not encourage such ties.

On the other hand, in the Old World, nature was much more often cultivated than not; relatively speaking, there was much less true “wilderness” left in Europe. Thus the American wilderness can be seen as providing a unique challenge to the technological paradigm, in two senses: first, it can be a challenge within the framework. In this sense, wilderness is something to be overcome by technology. It might prove at first unyielding to technology; for a long time we lacked the ability to blast holes through mountains, for example. Technology overcomes this challenge through the outworking of the paradigm, applying scientific insight with the aim of deconstructing natural resources for us. Second, wilderness can be a challenge to the framework of technology itself, for example by highlighting necessary conversations about domination vs respect and conservation. If the technological paradigm in and of itself must take a dominating stance to nature, then the existence of the wilderness could be seen as a counterexample to that paradigm.

Technology does have within itself some resources to meet this kind of challenge, however. Recreation and human enjoyment is one of the avowed ends of technology, and it could be argued (from within that framework) that we should therefore preserve some wilderness so that humans have access to that particular kind of pleasure. Borgmann points out that this kind of argumentation is not what he means by deictic discourse, and thus ultimately not the kind of talk that brings the real issues to the fore. When conservationists use these kinds of arguments (arguments according to practical rationality), they give up the possibility of speaking movingly and eloquently about this thing (the wilderness) that has so deeply affected them.

In other words, feeling the need to give a justification for conservation gives the game away before it starts, because it is then always an open move to rank the wilderness against some other supposed human benefit (like safety, or convenience). It fails to disclose nature to us as something other, something that has value in its own right outside of human instrumentality. As Borgmann says, “Discourse of nature can hope finally to be successful only if it abandons the conceptual outposts and bulwarks and allows nature to speak directly and fully in one’s words” (187).

Early analyses of technology vis a vis nature talked a lot about the intrusiveness of technology. The loud and brash steam locomotive, for example. There was a sense that technology was constructing a “machine in the garden”, so to speak. More recently, as Borgmann’s book is trying to show, technology has been shaping our lives more concretely precisely when it is less intrusive, precisely when it is the hidden backdrop of all our actions. A city suburb, for example, is a technological device through and through: a conglomeration of commodities procured by hidden machinery. Thus, “the advanced technology setting is characterized not by the violence of machinery but by the disengagement and distraction of commodities” (189). The balance has shifted. Now nature is the island, the garden in the machine, not the other way around.

On one hand, this feels defeating. Has nature been fully conquered? Borgmann wants us to take a more positive view: these islands can be sources of challenge for the technological paradigm, sacred spaces where technological distractions can be (in virtue of their conspicuous absence) be seen for what they are, viscerally. Borgmann’s not saying that we should turn nature into religion or that it’s the only way of accessing the divine, but it is a clear starting point for this kind of thing.

How does this work, exactly? How does nature have the possibility of bringing these issues up for us in this “sacred” way? We could look at some oppositions between life in technology and life in the wilderness.

• Technology annihilates time and space (in bringing everything and everyone closer in both dimensions, until space has no more meaning). Wilderness restores it to us. The sun is our compass, the land delineates clear boundaries with its physical features. A day in the wilderness is marked by the rhythm of the various activities necessary for survival.
• Technology bespeaks human creation; nature speaks to us as an another, outside the human world. It speaks as something in its own right, which devices never do.
• Technology takes a shallow view of objects, and turns them into commodities. Nature is eminently deep. An animal in the eyes of technology is a machine that produces such-and-such amount of meat and other materials that are worthless and must be discarded. In the wilderness, the animal is a focus of nature, a distillation of the land itself and the bounty that it can support. In the wilderness, we are not consumers or conquerors, but engaged guests. We can, in a different way even than the animal, gather and focus (like a prism) the beauty and meaning around us.

Of course, these days the wilderness is always bounded by or mediated by technology. We drive to the mountains. We see jet contrails while backpacking. These slight intrusions remind us of the troubled relationship between nature and technology. They call us to be less egotistical, less anthropocentric in our treatment of the world. We also recognize that in our wilderness expeditions nowadays, it is the blessings of technology that keep us warm, well-fed, and safe. Our technical clothing, footgear, lightweight tents, dried food, and so on. But wait a minute! Is it not contradictory with the spirit of Borgmann’s analysis to want to enter the wild in safety and ease? Maybe it is to some extent, but Borgmann acquiesces that it would be foolish to court death in the wilderness. We have to have a mature recognition that the need to risk our lives in nature has been done away with. Still, this doesn’t mean that we can simply let the wilderness vanish; in fact the opposite is even more true. Our position of technological safety in the wilderness highlights nature’s fragility and need for protection. In a way, we as the children of nature have grown up, and are now “old” enough (technologically advanced enough) to see the frailty and complexity of our parents. This situation should move us to compassion and care, not extortion or abandonment.

In other words, the wilderness can help us acknowledge our need for technology, the fact that we fundamentally rely on it now, and there’s no going back. At the same time, nature helps us acknowledge our need to limit technology. On its own, technology neither needs nor wants limits, but engagement with focal things (or practices) like nature can help us outline that more mature and humble engagement with technology. Focal things are not just forlorn, pre-technological bygones; they can have a new and deep splendor, even in the technological world, so long as we heed their call to a mature and appropriately limited technology.

In the next chapter, we’ll dig even more deeply into the concept of “focal things and practices”, and move from nature to a number of other examples and how they might be patterns for us to move forward and find yet more in our own lives, about which we can speak deictically and effectively.

[Header photo by the author; Joshua Tree in 2009]

We turn now to the chapter wherein Borgmann finally goes into detail about the kind of discourse he actually thinks can have an impact on the current state of technological society: deictic discourse. Deictic discourse is discourse guided by specific focal concerns. It’s hard to know exactly what that means, or why it’s especially effective, and this chapter unpacks its relevance.

The context for these considerations is our earlier discussion about society and the good life. The liberal democratic tradition thinks it has left the question of the good life open in a good and fruitful way, but Borgmann would say that it’s not actually as open as it looks. In fact, we live our lives according to a relatively constrained set of possibilities defined by the technological paradigm. Recognizing that this is the case is of course the first step to doing something about it. But this recognition and any ensuing conversation is actually a pretty rare thing. How come? Well, as a society, the only real public conversations left to us are in the realm of politics, and thanks to the ideals of liberal democracy, political debate is kept fastidiously free of any real moral discussion (for reasons enumerated in previous chapters, e.g., that questions of the good life are to be answered by individuals and not society). The irony is, again, that these questions haven’t been left open; we have chosen a definite way of life as a society, only we’re not allowed to acknowledge it as part of our public discourse. This is part and parcel of “the catastrophe of liberalism which overturns the traditional order without being able to institute a new one” (170).

It is deictic discourse that re-opens the possibility of that conversation. Crucially, it doesn’t strive for pure philosophical cogency (and by cogency Borgmann has in mind a style of argument that compels assent), but rather “points” (hence the term deictic from Greek deiknumi) to something in our common experience which might be able to make a claim on us in virtue of its focal nature (i.e., in virtue of its capacity for sustaining and orienting human experience and significance).

But hold on a minute. Is it really true that there is no “moral” discourse in our political debates? In a sense, Borgmann allows that there is. There are discussions about responsibility, honesty, accountability, and fair dealing, but by and large these fall within and are defined by the technological paradigm, and the explicit and banal goal of maximizing resources and profit. In that context, yes, it is objectionable for an operator to exhibit greed—but the moral force of our reprehension has little to do with the inherent moral vice of greed and more to do with the inappropriateness of that action in hindering the smooth working of the economic engine. Or occasionally some genuinely “moral” movements might spring up from political or religious motivations, but these usually end up simply promoting the expansion of technology to population segments that don’t have it yet. Finally, there are sometimes “purely moral” discussions that have to do with the death penalty, abortion, pornography, etc…, which are increasingly incomprehensible by a technological society and often just do a lot of harm.

The one thing that’s never actually on the table is the explicit goal of technology, namely consumption. Consumption comes pre-justified (unless it harms someone else). Someone might be considered frivolous for buying a car in a mid-life crisis, but it would be “his business to spend his money how he wants”, not an opening for an ethical conversation. But this sweeps off the table whole areas of life that used to be squarely within the field of ethics! Now these issues just get a free ride, without any possibility of moral critique.

Consumption, of course goes against a positive notion of freedom, i.e., the promise of technology for self-improvement, which is ironically removed even further from us when the self is realized via consumption. Borgmann believes that, deep down, we all feel this: “I believe that what shows itself in the vacuity or arbitrariness of most private moral discourse is neither ethical pluralism nor ethical chaos but complicity with technology” (173). In other words, what we consider with pride to be a good sort of liberal ethical pluralism is in fact a very definite, non-pluralistic kind of morality based around consumption. What we need is for this fact to take center stage as a moral issue.

For any moral issue to be genuinely discussed will be hard, however, because of the ghosts of dogmatistm, bigotry, superiority, etc…, not to mention that traditional morality holds no sway with modern society. But the most difficult aspect will be that deictic discourse lacks, according to Borgmann, “cogency and procurability”, which are now the standard requirements of any discourse, presumably because of the privileged place of science in explanation (never mind that people don’t actually understand how science works). Borgmann points out that this is actually a feature of deictic discourse, but in the context of our modern expectations of cogency, it is a challenge nonetheless.

But why be so quick to give up cogency? Why deictic discourse and not some other more airtight form of philosophical reasoning? As Borgmann points out, there’s a long history of philosophers trying to start with little and end with much, but just as in real life, this never actually works. Usually it turns out that stronger assumptions were smuggled in somewhere, and the dramatic conclusion is mere philosophical legerdemain, rather than a genuine proof. For example, JS Mill claims that, in most cases, focusing on one’s own happiness will lead to the greatest good for the most people (here the weak starting assumption is “just focus on your own happiness”, and the strong conclusion is that this will set society as a whole on the best path). Pascal’s Wager would be another example (it’s better to assume that God exists because that’s the bet that’s most likely to pay off, therefore…. God exists?). Borgmann’s point is that in each case the argument compels not because of its rational character but because of the strong, hidden starting assumptions, which are precisely where deictic discourse begins and ends. Only, it does so honestly, without pretending to be something other than it is.

Ultimately, if there’s going to be a successful critique of the social malaise inculcated by technology, it has to come through deictic discourse. So what could its impetus be? Borgmann says that it needs to begin with the inner experience of something of ultimate significance (i.e., a focal thing or practice) that’s threatened by technology, and it must be fueled by regard for our fellow human beings. What, then, are some of the characteristics of this kind of discourse? It has three descriptors:

1. It is enthusiastic: it is filled by the greatness of the thing that I’m disclosing, its potential for solace and delight. In other words, it springs out of a real and genuine (even transcendent) encounter with something.
2. It is sympathetic: it is tempered by concern for the integrity of the person I’m talking with. It cares more about that person than their allegiance to what I’m disclosing. In fact, I’ll prevent their agreement if it looks like it would injure their agency.
3. It is tolerant: it recognizes that violence or aggression will automatically nullify what I’m trying to disclose, and cause more harm than good. Violence and force are never worth it.

This is why Borgmann says that deictic discourse lacks cogency in a positive way: it simply discloses the good as an opportunity, as an open door that one may walk through, and the land through which I have experienced myself to be good. Deictic discourse is a witnessing or appealing kind of communication, not an expository kind of communication, or even a persuasive/rhetorical kind of communication. Borgmann says that this kind of discourse is what our democracy needs (and I heartily agree). Of course, liberal democracy must be opposed to deictic discourse since deictic discourse presumes to communicate a concrete aspect of the good life, and liberal democracy is committed to leaving the good life “open”. In other words, it believes that it has created an environment of true tolerance. The reply is as before: liberal democracy only claims to have left the good life open; in fact it hasn’t done so: “The question of the good life, as said before, cannot be left open. What remains open is not whether but how we will answer it.”

Deictic discourse has two modes, corresponding to its character of witnessing on one hand and appealing on the other. As a witness’s testimony, it becomes poetry. And as a strong appeal, it becomes politics. In fact, deictic discourse must be the ground of all real political action. Apodeictic discourse (the kind that comes by scientific or philosophical reasoning) can demand assent, but only in the narrow sphere of its own definitions. To connect it to action there must always be a deictic component. Deictic explanation is the only kind that can fill the is-ought gap.

A final critique of deictic discourse is that what is a focal thing or practice for me, what is of ultimate concern for me, is merely my imposition of significance. This is supposed to disqualify my appeal from generality, but Borgmann doesn’t dodge the critique. It is true, and irrefutably so. On the other hand, it’s inconsequential. Deictic discourse doesn’t aim to show that something is generally significant, or universally true. Its strength comes from precisely the opposite: it is grounded in the dirt of my own specific experience. It is unapologetically personal; it puts the question of significance to the interlocutor in a way that raises the question of her own experience as well. It says, in sum, “come and see”.

And thus ends Borgmann’s powerful explanation of deictic discourse. To drive the point home further, in the next chapter he will give an example of something about which deictic discourse is eminently suited: our natural environment and our relationship to it.

This is the first chapter of Part 3, “The Reform of Technology”, where we are going to consider how focal things and practices can amount to a solid reform of technology. We have some difficult topics to cover: how have attempts already been made to reform technology? How can we use language, itself patterned and conditioned by technology, to speak of reform? What exactly are these vaunted “focal things and practices”? If reform is even possible, how can it be extended to the national/international dialogue? Ultimately the goal here is to repair society to that it can recover and re-appropriate the initial hopes and promises of technology.

Specifically, Chapter 20 examines proposals for technology’s reform that are already on the table. True understanding is always a prerequisite to effective reform, and that has been the goal of TCCL so far. We also need to understand the space of possibilities for reform. Many people feel the need for a reform of technology, but the pains and frustrations that prompt this desire are various, and flow out of different analyses of the technological situation. Ultimately, the best reform will flow out of the best analysis of technology: if the analysis is superficial, so too will the reform be.

The main distinction Borgmann wants to make is between reforms within the paradigm of technology and reforms of the paradigm. Ultimately, he argues that what we need is the latter, but most of the reforms on offer fall into the former category, so that is what takes up most of the discussion for this chapter.

We’ve already met various suggestions for reform along the way in TCCL, in Part 2. Typically these take the form of calling for a return to the founding promise and hope of technology to make us better and to create the possibility of general liberty and prosperity. One example of such a call for reform is to “raise the value question” (as we discussed in Chapter 13), i.e., to bring to light society’s fundamental values and suggest that we examine them. The problem here is that technology is, on this picture, seen as a mere means, and so is ultimately compatible with whatever values society ends up adopting. The Device Paradigm can survive that kind of shift, and will continue to work itself out in the debilitating labor/leisure split we talked about in the last few chapters.

Other thinkers are disturbed by the kind of life technology fosters, but again call for change within the paradigm. The problem, it is thought, is that the machines aren’t doing their jobs well enough, or their value is not distributed equally enough. We need better machines, better software, and above all more human involvement and participation in the processes that lead to technical artifacts. While laudable and reasonable, these sentiments again don’t take the repatterning of technology as seriously as necessary. As we saw in Chapter 15 and Chapter 16, technology is too stable to respond to issues of social justice that don’t themselves threaten the paradigm, and is quite happy, perfectly-designed machines and all, to coexist with a variety of negative social arrangements.

Another large class of reform wants to see us take technology as a genuinely new development in human history, and to find meaning and inspiration in technology itself. Borgmann sees this brand of thinking as flowing out of “functionalism”, which we met without calling it such in Chapter 11 (in the guise of the idea that splitting things into their component “form” and “function” gives us insight about a thing’s essence; it is truly the “function” that matters). On this view what we need to do is to treat technological marvels as feats of human inspiration and genius, the way we see the great cathedrals of Medieval Europe. We should find in ourselves the same awe and sense of grandeur when contemplating the scope and intricacy of a particle accelerator as we do when viewing the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Borgmann argues that we will struggle in vain to achieve this, however, since the cathedrals of Europe were not just feats of construction and artistry; they presented and embodied a unified Medieval vision of the world that was accessible to all (even though the finer points of theology and art were not). The cathedrals formed a part of community ritual, and were present during every mode and season of life, through birth, death, and all kinds of other celebrations. Borgmann is not arguing for the Medieval view of the world, simply pointing out that cathedrals had a “comprehensiveness, unity, accessibility, and enactment” (160) to them that modern technological wonders don’t.

Borgmann has something similar to say (and at length) about Robert Pirsig’s classic book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The book’s main thrust is that careful attention to technological objects (like a motorcycle) can be as spiritually rewarding as as following traditional disciplines or contemplating natural objects. Ultimately Borgmann is just not convinced, and not least for the reason that the Device Paradigm is rendering our ability to truly understand even motorcycles obsolete. With the trend towards more complex machinery and simpler surfaces, we are rapidly departing the era where a motorcyclist might be able to truly understand the bike, tune it, repair it and so forth. What does it mean to contemplate an iPhone? We can’t take it apart, we can’t fiddle with it, we can’t get to know it, we can’t truly make it our own. All we have access to is the shiny surface and what developers are able to do with the predetermined APIs.

There are yet other types of reforms within the paradigm of technology, some of which are more mundane. We tacitly ask for reform whenever we want our software or our medicine to do a better job for us. But these “piecemeal” reforms are certainly without much in the way of insight. This is true for a number of reasons, but Borgmann calls out one in particular: it’s hard for technology to draw the line between serious contribution to humanity and frivolity or banality. But even if we could make this distinction, it’s not easy to see how technology could respond with its own resources, or whether a technological solution is even appropriate for the “serious” problems. As Borgmann says:

Assuming that frequent meals at fast food outlets are frivolous, should one oppose them, knowing that the burden of home-cooked meals will fall disproportionately on women? … Finally, there are unquestionably serious problems such as lung cancer and acid rain, for which, it would seem, we should try to find a technological fix by all available means. But these problems spring largely from frivolous consumption [smoking, mass production of unnecessary goods], and is it not more reasonable to prevent them from arising than to fix them technologically? (164)

In short, we can look at problems from either a technological or a social point of view, and we have for a long time been using only the first perspective, assuming that the right or best solution is technological. (This is certainly the case where I live in San Francisco, where social arrangements are constantly being disrupted by technological solutions to what are arguably social problems).

One stream of technological reform, what Borgmann dubs the “appropriate technology” movement, does acknowledge social reality to an extent. It is aware, for example, that simply dropping technological solutions on “third world” communities who have not yet had any history with technology can backfire in harmful ways. Or Ivan Tillich can talk about a “modern society of responsibly limited tools”, having in mind the absolutely admirable goal of inspiring society to consider acting within limits, and patterning our devices after that philosophy.

But ultimately, all these proposals of reform within the paradigm of technology don’t go deep enough. What we need is a reform of the paradigm itself. For Borgmann, this means that technology must be related to a “center”, instead of occupying that position de facto. By “center”, I think Borgmann has in mind a collection of things and practices that orient and sustain our lives, what he calls “focal concerns” or “focal things and practices”. Technology must be reformed so that it is arranged around those concerns, rather than occupying the center itself (and thereby eventually replacing those concerns with simulated and ultimately non-existent versions of them).

But how are we even to talk validly about these “focal concerns”? As we saw in our discussion of liberal democracy in Chapter 14, political discourse is set up in such a way that conversations about things of ultimate concern are out of bounds as topics of genuine debate. Borgmann will address how we might reclaim the validity of such discussions in the next chapter, “Deictic Discourse”.

Photo credit: Jessica Lipps 2015 (Succulent Clippings)

The point of this last chapter of Part 2 is to explore how “stable” the technological condition is on its own. We need to address this question because we’ve established that the technological condition is in need of reform. But if the whole thing isn’t very stable to begin with, then reform/revolution is easy: we simply wait for technological culture to fall apart on its own. In fact, many critics of technology take essentially this view—they believe technology is inherently unstable or has self-defeating tendencies. Borgmann disagrees with this assessment. His view is that technology has the resources within itself to solve whatever problems confront it, even the internal problems. The way that it will solve these problems is by continuing to extend the Device Paradigm into new areas, until it encompasses the whole of existence. Thus it is not a matter of technology “running out of steam” (pun intended), except accidentally or incidentally; it’s a matter of being clear about what a fully-technologized reality looks like so that we can attempt the necessary reform before it gets to that point. And that reform can’t be implemented if we misjudge the strength of the technological position.

This is the problem with many critiques of technology, Borgmann says, especially ones that begin with claims in the realm of ethics or morality. It becomes apparent in the course of argument that the proponents of technology have sufficient ways to reanalyze or respond to traditional morality, and so the critic has to retreat to saying, “well, that whole situation is not sustainable, you’ll see, it will fall apart one day” (Borgmann calls this the “unwarranted pessimism of the optimists” (145)). And indeed their pessimism seems unwarranted; however much our reality is reshaped by technology, it doesn’t appear to be falling apart of its own accord, though the traditionalists’ fears are indeed being realized. The most common claim about technology’s self-defeating character has to do with the ultimate limiting of resources. Critics argue that technology’s pace has only been sustained because we have not encountered an upper bound to the resources the technological engine needs to consume in order to continue producing new kinds of devices and commodities. But of course we will be running into that limit soon (and have already begun to feel the pinch more in the 30 years since Borgmann wrote, for example with oil). This will make the graph of technology’s effects look like an S-curve; innovation will eventually peter out.

This criticism is ultimately naive, though, because it doesn’t reflect solidly enough on the Device Paradigm. The paradigm has simply to be extended in a more universal manner, and the resource problem disappears. Once we begin to look at the Earth itself as a device (“Spaceship Earth”), we will look beyond the device to find the necessary resources to fuel the device. The challenges in doing so are “merely” technical, and surely the kind of challenges that technology is in a position to solve. Even the “political” or “moral” issues disappear once everyone is lined up behind this framework. The amount of time it took for us to go from total oblivion with regard to climate change or other negative effects of technology to radical awareness and action is astonishingly small (recognizing the fact that some powerful parties still refuse to acknowledge the issues). We’ve had this change of heart as a planet not because we’ve decided to curb our consumption in order to respect the natural limits set before us, but because we’ll run out of fuel and stall if we don’t take care. The moment we find a new source of energy to mine, we’ll proceed as before, with no greater permanent insight.

The deeper question in all this, of course, is: what does it mean for us to live in a device, a “ship” that requires “fuel”, floating in a vast, endless sea, rather than a familiar home, a mother, or any other of the more local conceptions of our planet? How does that alter our understanding of our own existence? How does it alter our respect for life for its own sake? And so on.

Ultimately, if the technological paradigm goes unchallenged, Borgmann believes the following situation will obtain:

• We will reach a “physically homeostatic equilibrium”, first for the technologized nations then eventually everyone. In other words, change and disruption will be a thing of the past. The “availability” of technology will be made to encompass our entire experience, so that everything is safe, secure, reliable, ubiquitous, instant, easy, and so forth.
• We will experience continued scientific discovery within whatever physical limits we’ve reached. After that, we will still have a limitless variation of commodities, not least of which will be around entertainment, which can mine culture (and via feedback, itself) in a self-perpetuating fashion ad infinitum.

Sound banal and dulling? The proponent of technology has to say that this picture isn’t getting imaginative enough about the possibilities of further technological developments. “Just wait!” she says, with regard to the upcoming “microelectronic revolution”. (Well, 30 years have passed, and we’re perhaps just now entering into the season that visionaries had in mind when they talked about the “microelectronic revolution”—what we would now perhaps call the “Internet of Things”). A fanciful blurb from Newsweek (when Borgmann was writing):

Welcome! Always glad to show someone from the early 80s around the place. The biggest change, of course, is the smart machines—they’re all around us.

It goes on to describe the various ways that “smart” devices around the home will make our lives easier and richer. You’d be familiar with all the examples: voice-controlled TVs and lights, kitchen appliances that mix cocktails perfectly, smart phone systems that know whom to screen, doors we unlock with our voice or fingerprint, etc… The question Borgmann wants to ask about this rhetoric is, “is this it?” Technology was initially propounded with such magnificent promise of lives enriched beyond measure, full of all the things that ultimately make existence significant. Has the promise been reduced to robotic mixologists and other devices that save us from the minor inconvenience of dealing with tasks and people? Perhaps not: there are still some authors, like Daniel Bell, who see technology as truly benefiting culture, making us all “more literate and educated”, as well as “culturally and politically attentive”. There are also of course all the “negative” benefits of technology, things like freedom from disease and so forth. But Borgmann’s main point is this: we have all either stopped caring about the deeper promises of technology, or not come to grips with the fact that those promises have not been realized, but have been co-opted by an endless progression of entertaining but meaningless paraphernalia. The promise of technology has been tied too strongly to the pattern of technology (the Device Paradigm). Can we recover the powerful vision (that spurred on technology’s early drivers) of our lives being transformed in genuinely good ways? Can technology be transformed?

If so, Borgmann says that:

It must be a way of finding counter-forces to technology that are guided by a clear and incisive view of technology and will therefore not be deflected or co-opted by technology. At the same time, such counter-forces must be able to respect the legitimacy of the promise and to guard the indispensable and admirable accomplishments of technology. (153)

Here we get a clear (if rare) statement that Borgmann is not opposed to the promise of technology or to recognizing its massive positive achievements. But the promise of technology must ultimately be grounded in something other than technology’s characteristic way of operating. We must not be asleep at the helm while the ship steers itself. And what exactly can ground technology in such a way is the subject of the next and last Part of TCCL: The Reform of Technology.

Photo credit: Jonathan Lipps 2008 (La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona)

We come now to one of the longest and, in my opinion, most interesting chapters of TCCL. The counterpart to the subject of the previous chapter (labor in technological society) is leisure. We recall that the splitting of life’s occupations into two distinct modes (labor and leisure) mirrors exactly the working of the Device Paradigm. Labor becomes the hidden machinery and leisure the surface, the commodity we are fundamentally “about” in life. Borgmann points out in this chapter that critiquing technological labor (what we have done in the previous chapter) is therefore only one side of the story: even proponents of technological society would readily admit that technological labor may not be the most fulfilling or most meaningful aspect of technological life. But the reason we accept the kind of work available in technological society is because it opens the possibility of leisure, of happiness—this is what the work is for. Surely technological society’s most compelling argument is to be found in the supposed fruits of technology, a life of leisure.

What are these fruits exactly? They come in two varieties: the first has a negative, disburdening character. Freedom from disease, for example. The other is more about consumption, which is what we normally associate with “leisure”. Technological visionaries took the negative form for granted; it was the positive form that conveyed the true promise of technology. But how has this actually been cashed out? As Borgmann says, “the fear that the positive and shining goal of technology has after two centuries of gigantic efforts remained distant and may even slip from sight leads a note of urgency if not panic to the pronouncements of those who urge that we continue to promote technology” (125). He quotes Isaac Asimov for context: “Robots will leave to human beings the tasks that are intrinsically human, such as sport, entertainment, and scientific research”. Here we begin to get to the heart of the issue. The promise of technology has always been that of a supremely enriched life. A life free of disease and premature death, certainly, but it is the positive character of the technologically liberated life which has inspired the speeches and rhetoric of technology’s proponents. It’s therefore eminently important to ask what exactly this positive character is supposed to be, and whether we see it actually taking shape in our lives.

There’s a problem in getting started with this question, unfortunately, and it has to do with the way that liberal democracy shields its inner workings from critique. Within this paradigm it’s inappropriate for us to discuss particularities of the ends individuals pursue; we can only ensure that those ends are left open. Borgmann wants to challenge this aspect of liberal democracy directly, and reopen a public discussion of the good life, but that particular argument awaits us in Part 3. For now, we have something else to work with, namely the concept of “excellence”. Borgmann argues that what is most clearly in view, both in the ideals of liberal democracy (what it hopes its citizens will aspire to) and in the promise of technological leisure, is something very much related to traditional notions of “excellence”. Borgmann sees excellence (inherited from the classical world with some Judeo-Christian influence) as consisting of 4 attributes:

1. World citizenship (understanding the structure and coherence of the physical and social universe, being politically and socially knowledgeable and engaged)
2. Gallantry (intellectual and physical valor and refinement)
3. Facility in music and the arts
4. Charity (the power to give, forgive, help, and heal)

Of course, these traits were perhaps only ever explicitly pursued by a non-working elite, but in the modern period there have existed analogues that all of us can readily relate to regardless of class. Assuming that something along these lines is implicitly or explicitly what proponents of technology like Asimov mean by “tasks that are intrinsically human” (i.e., the tasks we aspire to engage in with the leisure time afforded us by technology), we can straightforwardly evaluate whether our society is becoming “excellent” in this way by asking two questions: first, are people actually achieving these qualities in themselves? And second, whether or not they are achieving these qualities, how much of their available time and effort are they spending in pursuit of them?

I don’t think many will argue when Borgmann claims that the answer to the first question is a resounding “no”. Political disengagement is the norm, as is obesity. The arts are in decline, the foreign policy of the US can only be described as heavy-handed, and charity is rarely observed on the streets of our cities or in the laws we promulgate. We also have some data when it comes to answering the second question about how much time we spend pursuing activities that could reasonably lead to excellence as defined above. But before we answer that question, it is important to note that just because technological devices provide more free time, we don’t necessarily adopt it as leisure. We can also choose to engage in more labor (say to make more money and pursue a higher standard of living). That in fact is what we as a whole have consistently chosen, at least since WWII. We’ve chosen bigger houses and more commodities instead of more time to pursue “leisurely” ends. But what of the time that we do have for such ends? Borgmann goes into some detail on this, and with various qualifications, we can conclude that we spend about 4 times as much of our free time on TV as on excellence-promoting activities (sport, reading, political engagement, music, etc…). [And remember that Borgmann wrote TCCL three decades ago. Anecdotally, every statistic I’ve seen since childhood has only shown an increase in time devoted to TV and eventually Internet-based media.]

It’s likely that none of this is surprising, but Borgmann insists it should be disturbing to proponents of technology, who for hundreds of years have used something like the promise of excellence-filled leisure to inspire gargantuan efforts in the service of a technological reshaping of the world. Of course, it’s always open for a proponent of technology to let slip the moorings of traditional excellence, and claim that a technological age has its own inner logic that early advocates simply could not articulate. In fact, the Device Paradigm is one such formulation of technology according to its own inner workings: it says that the technological enterprise succeeds not when everyone is pursuing excellence but when every thing is technologically available (in the sense defined in Chapter 9). But does technological availability lead to happiness? Another way of putting the foregoing discussion about leisure is to say that technology has always held high the promise of happiness.

Happiness is of course hard to define a priori, and it’s no less of a moving target when defined from a technological perspective. But, it’s not difficult to ask people how happy they feel. If this kind of avowed happiness is any indication, technology is doing quite poorly; as technology has reshaped more and more of everyday life, professed happiness has decreased, at least since WWII. What explanations are there for this? Some (e.g., Scitovsky) warrant that while technological ends like watching TV are not inferior to the ends of traditional excellence, they tend toward comfort rather than pleasure (which Scitovsky argues involves some discomfort). Thus if we could manufacture the right neurochemical triggers, we could solve the problem of happiness by inducing constant pleasure. Clearly this is a position that leaves excellence by the wayside, and I don’t think Borgmann’s argument will appeal to someone who takes this strong view.

Another explanation for technological unhappiness comes from Hirsch. He argues that there are fundamentally three types of goods: (1) commercial goods or commodities, (2) positional goods (ones that clarify a person’s position in society, like a PhD or perhaps an expensive car), and (3) public goods (like clean air, trust, and open spaces; things that we either all have in common or none of us does). Hirsch’s critique of technology is then that technological society excels at bringing us goods of type #1, but not the other types. An expensive car, which used to be a positional good, once commoditized and made more available, ceases to be one. Or the introduction of freeways and extensive parking spaces rids us of clean air and public parks, thus vitiating public goods. And on Hirsch’s view, happiness is correlated with positional goods. While Borgmann appreciates in general this types-of-goods analysis, he doesn’t agree with Hirsch’s explanation of our dissatisfaction with technological society. According to Hirsch, we should be much more dissatisfied than Borgmann claims we actually are; on Borgmann’s view, as long as the escalator of commoditization keeps moving, positionality is maintained, and thus that can’t be the deepest source of our unhappiness.

Instead, Borgmann thinks that it is the divided character of technological goods themselves which renders us unsatisfied. As he says, “what distinguishes technological life is not surliness but its division into surfaces, rough or pleasant, and concealed, inaccessible substructures. Perhaps it is this divided character of our lives that leaves us unhappy”. In other words, the Device Paradigm puts part of life into these concealed substructures, taking them out of our grasp, along with any possibility of relationship with them. The Device Paradigm explains how a thing is divided into its function (or commodity) on one hand and its machinery on the other. A fireplace, a hearth, is turned into (1) a heating apparatus that delivers (2) warmth. But a hearth was never a free-standing element. It was always embedded into the fabric of social life, embedded deeply into family rhythms and the organization of the home. So by making a break down the middle of the hearth, technology not only divides the hearth, but it lifts it out of its context, “dis-embedding” it. If the former break is a “horizontal” break (dividing the hearth into say an “upper” commodity and a “lower” machinery), then a knock-on effect is the creation of “vertical” tears in the fabric of life of which the hearth was a part. As more and more “things” are reanalyzed as “devices”, these rifts become more concrete and distinct. The end result is a sea of free-floating devices, tastes, and commodities, which can be put together and arranged in a multiplicity of ways. This is what we now do as moderns when we build our “lifestyles” out of the variety of options made available to us through advertisements. But an infinitely-rearrangeable collection of commodities is vastly different from what we have been calling the “fabric” of life, where that word is chosen to convey an essential unity.

It is this fundamental distinction that Borgmann sees underlying our unhappiness with technological society, and why he believes that the resources for resolving that unhappiness cannot be found within technology itself (since the Device Paradigm is the constitutive pattern of technology’s operation). But we’ve only been examining one kind of technological good—the positive kind that most inspired technology’s early proponents. We’ve seen that technology has some deep difficulties in actually keeping the promises it’s made with regard to happiness. But what about the other kind of good, the negative, “defensive” goods like vaccinations, snow removal machines, etc…? Do they not provide happiness of a more lasting and solid kind than “mere” commodities? Borgmann maintains that the answer to this question is also “no”. Of course, upon their introduction into our lives, these goods provide a burst of happiness in the form of relief, and many (vaccines, for example), genuinely increase health in an appreciable way. But we quickly come to regard these as the status quo, and they no longer become noticeable except in their absence. Ultimately, comfort is a deadening force that attenuates our experience of the world to close to nothing. Work in technological society is a matter (for most people) of pushing buttons rather than engaging with true skill. And as a society we look for more and more minor inconveniences to wipe away with the magic wand of technology, only deepening our numbness with greater comfort.

So why do we stand this? Why have we as a society not recognized this source of our unease and done something about it? Borgmann points out that while these negative or “defensive” goods can only solve so many problems before becoming completely banal, there is another stream of technological good that is unlimited, namely entertainment. Borgmann defines “entertainment” as commodities we can eat, see, and hear, and these are all things which have by now become totally available in a technological sense. The classic example of entertainment is TV (though now it should perhaps be online media). Borgmann’s problem with TV is not so much that it actively harms society as that it prevents other, genuinely good things from occurring. TV, and now the tablet device, have become the pre-eminent parenting tool for modern children, who grow up under a flood of missed parenting opportunities. The fact that TV and the Internet also prevent us from pursuing activities that lead to our avowed societal and individual goals of excellence is another example. And a TV, of course, is the perfect example of the Device Paradigm, split perfectly into a magical commodity (TV screens these days are just about 100% viewing area) and ineffable machinery. Borgmann thinks that all of this can perhaps explain our unhappiness in a deep way: we all know the quality of TV programming is not that great, and that it doesn’t in general promote an excellent life to watch it. But at the same time we can’t let go; “it provides a center for our leisure and an authority for the appreciation of commodities” (143). As a limitless form of entertainment, it is a palliative for our unhappiness even as it perpetuates it.

Clearly, this picture of modern life is bleak. If we agree with Borgmann, we’ll want to be asking the question of how we can reform such a condition. That’s where Borgmann goes in Part 3 of TCCL. But before we explore the reformation of technology, we have to ask how stable the condition we’ve just described is. How stable is the technological paradigm? This is what we’ll discuss in the next chapter!

The previous 16 chapters have sufficed to give us a good sketch of the character of technology, outlining it and delineating it in various ways. But now Borgmann is concerned to give the picture some depth, some attachment to the world that we all live in so as to impress upon us the seriousness of our current social predicament and how the Device Paradigm now typifies the structure of something so essentially quotidian as work. There are of course many other clear examples of the impact of technology in our world, in science, the military, etc… But work and leisure are concepts with which every citizen is intimate, and so showing the radical effect of technology in this sphere is a good way to implicate each of us in its operation.

Borgmann’s basic thesis is that “work” as a concept and praxis has split down the middle into “labor” and “leisure”, showing the characteristic rift of a technological device (the rift between ends and means, at the deepest philosophical level). This situation is, he claims, unique to the modern era, and should be interpreted as a direct result of the expansion of the Device Paradigm into more and more areas of human life. So what are “labor” and “leisure”? Leisure he defines as the “unencumbered enjoyment of commodities”, whereas labor is “devoted to the construction and maintenance of the machinery that procures the commodities” (114). So there is an interesting recursive or circular nature to the equation, where work is relegated from the status of something significant in and of itself to a means to the end of leisure. This chapter is dedicated to understanding the concept of labor just described (“technological work”), in technological society. The next chapter will be devoted to the concept of leisure.

Why do I say that work has been “relegated” or “degraded”? Borgmann takes for granted that, in pre-technological eras, work was, in at least some contexts, fulfilling and ennobling. He doesn’t claim that all pre-technological work is in this category, but rather that there are concrete existential proofs of this fulfillment. So we can at least ask whether, in our technological society, there is the possibility of fulfilling and ennobling work—whether labor as the means to leisure can be put in this category. Borgmann clarifies that “technological work” is not the specialization of labor (an ancient practice indeed) or the dividing of the work process into discrete chunks (a common strategy for any craftsperson). What’s unique about work in the era of technological society is the division of the work process into the smallest possible pieces, and making a single piece the entire responsibility of a single class of worker. This is what distinguishes the artisan from the assembly line worker: the artisan who makes a hundred objects might divide the work process into distinct stages and tackle each stage for all products at once; but she is at the end of the day responsible from start to finish. The assembly line worker, on the other hand, is responsible for only a tiny piece of the finished product, a piece which has been removed from its context and which makes it difficult for the worker to self-identify as an owner or craftsperson.

So why did we move to an assembly-line model? What are its advantages? Adam Smith and other early proponents of a (proto-)technological approach to labor thought that being responsible for just one small task would enable a worker to perform that task with the highest degree of dexterity. This in turn would promote an emphasis on the twin values of reliability and productivity (part and parcel of the concept of technological “availability” discussed earlier). Reliability and productivity are at their highest when so many “human” elements (individual judgment, mood, energy, attitude, etc…) are eliminated from the production process. In the limit, of course, this means doing away with the human as producer entirely (which we’ll get to in a moment), but before robotics was a viable solution, it meant narrowing the window of responsibility for the individual human worker to something small enough that that person’s individuality could not impress itself upon the final product. Of course, whether this actually promotes “dexterity” depends on what you mean by that word. As Borgmann says, if you mean trained ability of bodily timing, strength, and overall care and precision, then the assembly-line model actually eliminates dexterity.

In addition, dividing labor in this way, in every instance where it springs up, always comes to replace an existing societal structure, splitting that structure into the twins of production and commodity. Borgmann gives the example of insurance—before financial instrumentation became sophisticated, securing oneself against the vicissitudes of life involved a network of neighbors or guildmates who, to a greater or lesser degree, ameliorated the pain of individual loss. As security has now become technologized and commoditized, it can be had much more reliably, plentifully, and without the social awkwardness of asking for help; it can be had with cash. But in this way we have also of course lost something hard to define—a sense of community or trust in one’s fellow creatures, perhaps.

These claims about technology’s dulling effect on the character of work are not intended to be universal: technology does provide extremely satisfying work… but primarily for those involved at the forefront, the leading edge of the technical enterprise. The engineers, programmers, and entrepreneurs who uncover a technological solution to a problem follow a challenging and rewarding path to that solution, a path often full of energy, vigor, and the sense that one’s capacity is being tested, enlarged. But in our wake (and I say our for I’m such a technologist professionally) we leave a “wasteland of divided labor”. The skill taken to divide a kind of work into its smallest manageable components is interesting and rewarding, but for those who are left with those bite-sized chunks of labor as their livelihood, the satisfaction is greatly lessened. Work that was previously done by an artisan can now be done by the combination of machine and unskilled worker (or eventually, entirely by machine).

Borgmann points out that this situation should be really embarrassing for liberal democracy, which as we saw in an earlier chapter lists the maximizing of human potential and fulfillment as its chief aim. But like social injustice, as a society we are content to bear the degradation of work for the technological promise of liberation. And so we readily believe that yesterday’s work force is “outdated” or must be “upgraded” to adapt to the digital age (rather than asking whether these “upgrades” actually give greater satisfaction to those whose work is radically altered by them). Or we claim that the greater length of education reflects a higher degree of training necessary for working in the modern world (rather than allowing that it might be artificially lengthened by the generally decreasing need for labor—education as labor’s “waiting room”). Or we ignore that it is an ever-shrinking pool of technological elites that provide the driving force of technological progress.

So far we’ve argued that we do mask the ongoing degradation of work, even in a liberal democracy that strongly believes in the dignity bestowed by work. But this doesn’t explain why we’ve done that. How was it ever possible? In fact it was a long and sometimes violent process to mold workers into assembly-line worker bees. Convincing craftspeople to give up ownership of the entire production process was a hard sell, at first. And it would be easy to find blame with early entrepreneurs or capitalists, who sometimes viciously forced workers into this new cast. But Borgmann sees the deepest answer in the promise of the Device Paradigm itself—the promise of liberation and enrichment. And we as a society have been happy to pay the price for this. We’ve traded in satisfaction in work for the lessening of burden and the promise of leisure, implicating ourselves in this rift between “labor” and “leisure”. (And I don’t think I need to quote American TV-watching statistics for you to have an understanding of what “leisure” typically means in our culture).

This trend is only going to continue. Borgmann, writing over three decades ago, looks ahead to the “microelectronic revolution”, which has long since ascended to the status quo. Devices have become so compact and complex that only a small group of experts can truly tell you what’s going on inside. Fixing an individual microchip by hand is of course out of the question. But devices built around these ineffable-to-us constructs form an ever-greater portion of our daily lives. The current revolution, that of software (which was crowned king by the Internet), pushes things further in this direction. The fad in the San Francisco startup culture where I am embedded is all about “disrupting” existing markets and ecosystems—and of course, pre-software or pre-Internet ways of life. Ultimately what we are disrupting is work itself; through a combination of robotics and software engineering, it will be eliminated entirely. So what then? Will we develop respectable and enjoyable modes of unemployment (which heretofore has been a social standing lacking in dignity)? Will our “work” essentially become “busywork”, with no real value? Or will work be redistributed across available workers so that average work time is reduced, and leisure time increased?

And in any of those scenarios, the crucial question becomes: what will we do when we’re not working? And will it be worth doing? For that, we’ll have to await the next chapter: “Leisure, Excellence, and Happiness”.

This is the last chapter in the section on technology and its relationship with the political aspect of society. One of Borgmann’s primary insights here is that technology is a good explanation for the social and political apathy that is so prevalent, yet so disturbing in a nation like the US whose founding ideals are very much linked with political engagement.

The primary reason for this state of things is that politics has become the “metadevice of the technological society” (107). By this Borgmann means that the political system has itself taken on the characteristics of the Device Paradigm—procuring certain commodities for us while relegating to obscurity its own inner workings. And it is a “metadevice” because what it is now primarily concerned with procuring is the smooth functioning of technology in society! Government has become the servant whose purpose is to keep the technological machine humming, because this machine is what society now generally feels is the key to fulfillment and equality.

It is easy to see the “deviceification” of government at work. Its bureaucracy is Byzantine, and as citizens we hardly know how it works other than that our taxes go in and various social services and protections come out. The human and personal are not at home in a system like this (as an anecdote, I called the California DMV earlier this week, and was greeted with a customer service representative’s bored voice: “Hello, this is 478, how may I help you?”). Huge governmental structures have been built up with the sole purpose of eliminating disturbances in how we go about procuring commodities. With this as the primary goal, it’s no surprise that citizens have no particular reason to be engaged—unless our ability to live out the aims of technological availability become threatened.

This doesn’t mean that technology has blocked all possibility of genuine political engagement, but for most of us it’s a moot point. We’ve become apathetic essentially out of contentment. But this raises some important questions. What about the energizing democratic ideal of equality? Surely no one would say we’ve obtained full equality in our society. Shouldn’t technology through its equalizing tendencies spur on political engagement around this ideal? Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. Despite what Borgmann calls technology’s “weak” tendency towards equality, there is a deeper process at work. We tend to measure inequality quite bluntly from the perspective of income (which is itself defined in terms of technology—essentially as the rate of commodity acquisition available to us), rather than many of the other qualities we could choose to measure.

Clearly, there is great inequality in our country when it comes to income. A number of explanations have been given for this, most unsatisfactory. Some failed hypotheses:

1. Income reflects work; the more you work, the more income you have. Thus it all boils down to how hard one works.
2. Inequality incentivizes work, so it’s a good thing we have inequality to help kickstart the economic engines.
3. People are just in the dark when it comes to inequality, so it sticks around.

None of these claims are true. Borgmann’s explanation is that inequality gives a clear indication of what the stages of technological availability are, and therefore a promise of what a given individual will be able to procure in the future. What the wealthy upper classes have access to today, through the gifts of technology will be available to the middle classes in 10 years and the lower classes 5 years after that. Thus in a technological society inequality is constant, but quality of life is like a moving escalator—just wait 5 years and you will be able to have the kind of quality of life that higher-income individuals have now. We have a good reason, as lower- or middle-class society, then, to suffer this inequality. If the upper classes drive the development of technology that only they can afford, it will certainly be available to us at some point in the future—we have just to wait.

Technology is therefore embedded deeply but subtly into the hopes and goals of our economic reality. True to form, it stays in the background unless threatened. In fact, most actual political energy (despite the recent moral debates in our country) is around maintaining the proper function of this escalator. Substantial inequalities that don’t impinge on the ability to continually procure successively more impressive commodities are ignored or back-burnered. As long as the escalator functions, our focus and energy will be on attaining the next level, on consuming tomorrow what the classes higher than us are consuming today. Thus technology contributes a sort of political numbing effect, a deep disengagement with civic responsibility except where the technological machine threatens to break down. It goes without saying that this makes true political discourse—discussion about matters of the common good and indeed what the good life of society is—impossible.

In this chapter, Borgmann is interested in answering the question of how people actually relate to technology in our society, regardless of the role technology plays in the political theories that undergird society. Looking at empirical sociological data is difficult, because so many interpretations can be given to, e.g., survey data. So he acknowledges that we have to come to the data with a bit of a guiding premise, which the previous chapters have provided.

The first helpful question we can ask in regard to the chapter’s theme is: how do people take responsibility for technology? Do they do so at all? Do they engage in active choice? This line of questioning is interesting because it gets at the heart of the character of technology, highlighting the substantive and instrumental positions that would give different answers about what that character is. On a substantive view, people have essentially no responsibility—technology as a thing in its own right has overpowered us and we are now unable to choose against it. This is a kind of determinism. The instrumental view would argue the opposite: that we remain free agents and are always in fact choosing for or against technology; the fact that we almost always choose for it is therefore purely our responsibility. Borgmann isn’t a fan of either of these positions, and points out that we’re not likely to come to a philosophical agreement on free will vs determinism that could help adjudicate between them.

Answering the question empirically is fraught with conceptual problems, too. Technology isn’t presented to us as a choice, but rather a basis for other choices, in which a vote for the technological paradigm is already implied (in the same way that a good salesperson will ask a client which of a variety of services will meet the clients needs best, not whether the client needs any services at all). A choice against technology is therefore kind of odd—it would seem paternalistic and totalitarian, a vote for remaining in squalor when so much opportunity is at hand. Thus technology disappears at the very moment of choice, and becomes the ground for choice rather than its object.

But, we can ask a proxy question: to what amount do people engage with focal things and practices, and to what amount do they disengage with them in favor of technological substitutes? This would give us a good idea of how people are actually choosing in regard to technology even when it remains in the background. From this perspective, we gain a lot of information when we observe, say, a family choosing to eat out rather than prepare a meal at home. Or when we observe young professionals moving from city to city for the sake of career advancement rather than choosing a life of being rooted in one place. Or when we observe children being gifted with limitless amounts of music on their mobile devices instead of being given a musical instrument.

Borgmann is clear that these choices are not necessarily conscious. The whole idea of the paradigm of technology is that it is the fundamental operating pattern of our society; choosing according to this pattern is therefore the normal, the obvious thing to do. Technology is not an overtly oppressive overlord that visibly threatens our freedom, rather freedom is its promise. All this to say, it doesn’t require conscious choice to move in the direction of lesser engagement with focal things and practices, but these are still choices, however deeply patterned. Borgmann calls this being “implicated” in technology. We already exist within its paradigm, and so without conscious choice we will continue to choose according to the pattern of technology.

But what moves us to take the first step in this direction, however “normal” it is? Relief (at the thought of not having to prepare another meal when one is already tired). Hope (of the procurement of nicer things made more available through technology). Impatience with the obstinate nature and slow pace of non-devices. The desire to see children given opportunities to grow as quickly and painlessly as possible. But there is often a nagging feeling that comes with trading in focal things and practices because of these motivations. When that is (at least initially) present, Borgmann sees us not just as “implicated” in the world of technology, but “complicit” in it.

With this framework in hand, we have an idea of how to evaluate sociological data, for example, a survey of people’s attitudes towards technology. The survey that Borgmann highlights asks about respondents’ attitudes towards three statements:

• “People have become too dependent on machines”
• “Technology has made life complicated”
• “It would be nice if we would stop building so many machines and go back to nature”

The published results highlighted that there was “considerable ambivalence” towards technology in responses, and that people exhibited contradictory understandings of what technology actually is. That being said, it was clear that in general technology was viewed favorably. Further exploration of motivations unveiled that, despite ambivalence in attitude, people look to technology to provide higher and higher standards of living and leisure. That is, while respondents were on balance convinced that technology increased their general happiness (which has been shown in other studies not to be the case), they were unsure about the positive effect of technology on overall standards of living (which is remarkable given that it be clearly shown that technology has indeed advanced global health and living standards). In other words, what people wanted from technology was not just a certain standard of living, but a constantly increasing standard of living.

These results, Borgmann points out, mesh very well with the definition of “complicity” he gave earlier. While there is some sense that we are losing something in turning to technological solutions, we continue to look to them for increased quality of life. While on one hand we are simply choosing technological modes because they are the default, on the other hand we know in some sense what we are doing and why; in that sense we are free, and therefore “complicit” or responsible. The question Borgmann does not yet ask is whether we acknowledge that responsibility and what our attitudes are towards it. Do we affirm and own these choices, or do we sweep them under the rug?

We now continue our discussion of technology and the political arena. This chapter in particular is about the theoretical dimension of politics, i.e., how people have formulated the ideas behind our political system and how they interact with technology. We in the US and many other places exist within what is broadly known as the “liberal democratic tradition”. It can be defined succinctly as the intersection of the values of liberty, equality, and self-realization. More than anything else, liberal democracy wants to leave the question of the good life (what is it to live well as a human being?) open, because it believes the individual self must determine its own answer to that question.

What Borgmann is concerned to argue here is that it is only the paradigm of technology which allows liberal democracy to achieve its three-fold aims, and thus technology becomes the hidden engine, pushing this political system forward while the system itself fails to acknowledge that, clothed in the tidings of liberal democracy or not, the pattern of technology comes with a concrete and definite vision of the good life. In other words, there is a deep contradiction in the heart of the theory: what it wants it can only get (via technology) at the cost of what it holds most dear.

Echoes of this theorizing can be found as early as JS Mill: “The grand, leading principle…is the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity” (86). Since then, debates (between scholars like CB Macpherson and Ronald Dworkin) have focused on what constitutes this moral idea of “human development”. Is it that everyone is equally free to realize her potential? Is it some more positive form of opportunity? Ultimately, it has become clear that no agreement on that point is forthcoming. For Dworkin, this situation is to be expected, for “to arrogate the determination of the good life for others is to practice paternalism” (88). The responsibility of the theory is merely to provide justification for self-determination.

This plays very conveniently into the multiplicity-of-ends philosophy that undergirds and is encouraged by the technological paradigm. And so we see that same paradigm at work in politics: electoral debates become about how to secure the conditions of the good life, not what that good life is. (Of course, some theorists are not content to provide space for self-determination and explicitly conform their theories to the promise of technology; “utopian democracy”, for example, aims to procure radical availability (precisely the promise of technology)—essential possessive equivalence, without a class structure).

But in general, what we have is a theory of liberty (freedom, equality, and self-development) defined negatively, telling us purely what to do to create space for a theoretical infinitude of possible ends. And this (despite all the practical impossibilities around creating that kind of negative equality) is beginning to sound exactly like a system of devices. Moreover, it hides the deeper question: what is the nature of opportunities we say are essential for “equality”? There is a spectrum of answers here, and Borgmann names three points along it: first, we have the “constitutional” or “formally just” society, where society is given (in technical terms) freedom to pursue their own ends, but not the means by which to do it. Then we have the “fair” or “substantially just” society which provides freedom and some kind of means by which to pursue individual goals. Finally, we could think of a totally “good” society, which provides in addition to freedom and means a direction, a set of centering and orienting goals—a vision of the good.

Borgmann then argues that it’s impossible in any of these types of theories to avoid the concept of goodness or centering/orienting goals. Even in the merely “constitutional” or “fair” society, the nature of opportunities is going to be present in some pattern, in some definite shape; in liberal democracy, that shape is the pattern of technology. But because this definite shaping is anathema to the spirit of liberal democracy, which aims to keep itself out of the good life, it ends up sweeping under the rug the intrusion of the vision of the good defined by technology. Liberal democracy denies us a vision of the man behind the curtain because it is so damaging to the purity of the theory. Think about even basic structures in our society like roads or television. It could be argued that networks such as these are value-neutral, mere equality-and-opportunity-producing mechanisms—a road being built does not force you to drive on it! On the other hand, as Borgmann puts it, “a mountain valley split by a road is no longer a place for solitary hiking” (96). The point isn’t that roads are bad, it’s that it is disingenuous to assert that even basic infrastructure is “mere” means, and doesn’t arrogate itself as an end. It does, even if by just restricting the kinds of life available to us! The systems of our society may be indifferent when it comes to how we consume commodities, but they don’t really give us the option of not engaging with commodities in the first place.

Ultimately, Borgmann wants to bring a discussion of this hidden pattern out into the open. It is only once we have acknowledged that we all come to the table with ideas about the public, shared good life (whether we like it or not) that we can have a productive conversation in the political arena about issues more substantial than the continued production of commodities.

Next up: we move from theory to practice and look at how people in our society have in fact come to terms with the technological paradigm.

Talk video

Slides

[speakerdeck https://speakerdeck.com/jlipps/internet-of-nothings]

Talk notes/transcript

Hello everyone! Good morning! I’m Jonathan Lipps, @jlipps on Twitter, and I work for a company called Sauce Labs. I’m in charge of our Ecosystem & Integrations team, which means I help take care of the open-source ecosystem around Sauce Labs and automated testing. Mostly I work on a project called Appium, which I talked about at LXJS last year. I’m really proud that Sauce is sponsoring LXJS again! And I want to thank the organizers for the amazing job they’ve done making this a remarkable conference for the JavaScript community. Last year, with their support and encouragement, I had the most fun I’ve ever had giving a conference talk, and I’m very thankful to have the opportunity to hang out with you guys a second time.

This year, I don’t have a crazy software robot music demo. Instead, I want to engage you guys with some questions I think are important for us to wrestle with. Something I love about the JavaScript community is that we take the time to talk about more than programming. We don’t always have a perfect dialogue about cultural issues, but I’m heartened that it exists. There are many industries out there you’d be hard-pressed to find the barest recognition that its community is made up of people, not just “professionals”. I like that the JavaScript community, and this conference, recognize that we are human beings first and foremost, even though we are gathered here because of a shared love for programming and JavaScript. So here’s my attempt to engage that human aspect of our technological adventure.

I think what I have to say is best digested as a conversation, not a series of bullet points, and I want these 20 − 30 minutes to be merely the first words of that conversation. I hope you’ll listen to what I have to say, evaluate it critically, and find me sometime this weekend to continue the dialogue.

OK! Enough preamble. I want to talk to you guys about the philosophy of technology. Philosophy and technology are both long-term loves of mine, but it’s only recently that I was made aware that you could put them together. Of the two, technology came first for me. Let’s take JavaScript specifically since we’re at LXJS: I wrote my first JavaScript code about 17 years ago when I needed a scrolling ticker for a welcome message on my website. Sounds like exactly the sort of thing you’d use JavaScript for back then, right? And when I say “wrote”, I mean, “copy and pasted”. It wasn’t until 12 years ago that I wrote my first JavaScript program from scratch myself—a supremely customizable, JS-only drop-down menu script. I even made it “open-source”, though I had no idea what that really meant!

When I got to university, instead of studying computer science as I originally intended, I chose to pursue philosophy, because I was curious about the biggest questions it was possible to ask: questions about God, the nature of reality, the nature of science, how we truly know things, and so on. Of course, there’s not a lot of job opportunities as a philosopher, so I ended up becoming a programmer by trade anyway.

One thing I learned from philosophy is how to approach questions. Another thing I learned, which any of you who’ve had a philosophy course can corroborate, is that there are always more questions to ask. It can start to feel disorienting, when you’ve asked so many questions, like the rabbit hole goes on forever, and we might as well get back to doing Real Work (like programming, maybe).

Sometimes, this otherwise praiseworthy pragmatism can leave important issues unexamined. And as we know from Socrates, “the unexamined life is not worth living”. So, what have we left unexamined in the pursuit of our technological careers? What has the world left unexamined in its wholehearted and wholesale adoption of technological solutions to nearly every problem? Quite a lot, I’d argue! But now I just want to focus on two areas of modern technology, two buzzwords which are familiar to us in our community: the first is the Internet of Things, and the second is the Quantified Self.

What is the Internet of Things? In my understanding it’s the concept that everyday objects, things which have not traditionally been considered computers, can and should be connected to each other, networked in order to enhance the benefits they provide. Another way of looking at it is to say it’s the process of turning “things” into “devices”.

Now’s a good time to introduce my favorite philosopher of technology, a professor at the University of Montana, Albert Borgmann. Part of Albert Borgmann’s take on on technology is that there is a deep and significant divide between “Things” (Capital-T), and “devices”. This distinction is so important that for him, that for him, technology itself is characterized by what he calls the Device Paradigm. I’ll explain the Device Paradigm in a moment.

A central question in the philosophy of technology is whether technology should primarily be thought of as a content-less tool, which gains significance purely through the intentions we as the tool-users give it, or whether it has a character of its own, independent of how it is intended to be used. In other words, is technology more like an axe—a tool which can be used for the beneficial purpose of chopping firewood, or the horrible purpose of murder—or more like capitalism or socialism—systems which shape and color every action that takes place within their paradigms, no matter the intent behind those actions? Most people like to think of technology as a tool. We can appropriate it for good purposes or bad, but technology itself is neutral; it has no character outside of the purposes we put it to. But Albert Borgmann has a strong argument that this isn’t the right way to look at technology, and it involves the Device Paradigm that I mentioned earlier. Borgmann claims that technology can best be understood and explained by looking at canonical examples (i.e., a “paradigm”), and noting what they have in common.

What they have in common is the attempt to make a certain good available in a non-burdensome way. What I mean by “good” in this case is just something that’s necessary or desirable for human life. Food, drink, safety, entertainment, etc… And what I mean by “available in a non-burdensome way” can be cashed out in terms of four requirements. Let’s take an example to explore these requirements more concretely. Let’s say the good is heat. For many parts of the world, some form of non-naturally-occurring heat is an essential part of daily existence, especially in winter. Now we can think about different ways of procuring this good of “heat”. A pre-technological way would be to light a wood fire in a stove, whereas a technological example is the kind of electric- or gas-powered central heating systems most of us probably have in our homes.

It’s probably obvious that a fire is not available in a non-burdensome way, when compared with a central heating system. But let’s go through the four aspects of “availability” to see why. For something to be truly “available” in this sense is for it to be, first of all, instantaneous. A wood fire is definitely not instantaneous. Wood is not instantly available in burnable form; it has to be chopped and gathered, which is a hard and time-consuming process. A central heating system, on the other hand, begins to provide heat as soon as you flip a switch or move a dial.

Secondly, perfect availability requires that a good be ubiquitous, meaning it must be available everywhere. A wood fire does not meet the standard here, in that when it provides heat, it does so unevenly, only in the vicinity of the fire itself. A central heating system uses a combination of ducts and vents in order to ensure that the entire house benefits equally from the heat.

The third requirement is safety. For a good to be perfectly available, it must be provided in a perfectly safe way. A wood-burning stove is definitely not safe. Working with the tools required to chop wood can be a source of serious accidents. And the fire itself of course is very dangerous, potentially causing death and destruction if not tended appropriately. A central heating system, on the other hand, is relatively safe. We can leave it on for months or years without worrying that it will burn down our house.

Finally, for a good to be truly available it must be delivered easily, without a lot of physical or cognitive effort. It definitely takes a lot of effort to prepare, use, and clean a wood-burning stove, never mind the effort to chop and stack the wood in the first place. It takes mental effort to remember to check the stove and keep it heating optimally. Central heating, on the other hand, is so easy to use, many of us forget that it’s even a part of the house. We can set it on a program that matches our heating needs and not think about it ever again, unless it breaks down.

So, this is the foundation of the Device Paradigm: the process of making goods available in a non-burdensome way. And indeed, this has been precisely the promise of technology since Descartes dreamed about what control of the physical environment would allow humanity to achieve—the elimination of the burdens and dangers that made life disagreeable and unpleasant. This sounds like a reasonable, laudable goal, right? I won’t argue that it’s not. But it’s important to realize two things about it. First of all, this is the very DNA of technology. It’s a philosophical stance at the very core of the technological enterprise. Everything technology touches is going to be shaped according to this philosophy. In that sense, it’s not true that technology is just a neutral tool. It has a definite character, and that character is the continuous attempt to make goods available in a non-burdensome way.

Secondly, and more importantly, this focus on availability leads inevitably to a rift down the middle of things themselves, a division of a thing into a mechanism and a product. Let’s go back to the example of heating. In pre-technological eras, it wasn’t possible to distinguish a good from the way that good was procured. In the middle of a cold winter, it wasn’t possible to have heat without fire. And it wasn’t possible to have fire without firewood. And it wasn’t possible to gather that firewood without going through the laborious process of chopping up trees. So staying warm was inextricably tied up with this direct physical investment of time and energy.

But once we have enough control of nature, we can produce heat without firewood. We can begin to think of heat as a commodity, as something independent of the way that it is produced. And once we do this, we can begin to care progressively less about the way that it is produced, until we wind up with the current situation, where we enjoy central heating in our homes without having any idea how it actually works. And it doesn’t matter. If central heating technology changed tomorrow to use a completely different method of heat production, and someone installed it in our house without telling us, we would never notice. What matters to us is the commodity, the good that is produced.

Let’s look at another common device as an example: a television. What is the good or commodity that a television provides for us? Well, embedded in a larger cultural system, it’s entertainment or information. But purely as a physical object, the good that it produces is clarity of representation of a moving picture. What we would predict then, on the basis of the Device Paradigm, is that the physical construction of a TV might change radically over the years, while the screen—the part that is most directly related to providing the good (clear representation of a moving picture)—would change in basically one way: becoming even clearer and more prominent. And this is exactly what we find. Early TVs were mostly bulk, with a small, distorted, black-and-white screen. And through a variety of vastly different picture-producing mechanisms, we have gradually evolved to where we are today: Large, flat TVs where it is almost not possible to see anything other than the amazingly-clear screen. We don’t care that our TV set uses liquid crystals rather than vacuum tubes, and if the technology changed tomorrow to something cheaper or easier to manufacture, hardly anyone would even notice.

The point that I’ve been trying to make is that devices don’t have a single essence. They have a divided essence: two aspects, or layers. One aspect is the thing the device does for us: its commodity, good, or function. The other aspect is the physical stuff of the device itself: the arrangement of silicon and metal, or whatever, that enables the device to live out its function. Another way of looking at it is that there’s a distinction between means and ends in devices themselves. What the device is for, and how it does what it’s for. This all might seem obvious and natural to us, given that our world is full of devices. But this distinction, this way of looking at things, is actually radically new in the history of humanity. In the pre-technological era, you couldn’t have heat without a stove or fireplace in your room. You couldn’t have music without a musician and an instrument. You couldn’t enjoy a dramatic performance without the actors there in front of you.

OK, so what? What’s wrong with making the ugly parts of a TV less prominent, and the screen more prominent? And the answer is: nothing. Nothing’s wrong with it. The sole purpose of a TV is to provide a full, clear picture, and so the ideal TV is pure picture and nothing else. The problem comes in when we use technology to make goods available to us which were once delivered through a deep engagement with the natural world or society, and which often brought along intangible or unquantifiable goods with them as part of the process. Let’s go back to the example of the wood-burning stove. It certainly had all the drawbacks that I mentioned before in terms of availability. Compared to a central heating system, chopping wood and keeping it burning in one room of the house is an awful lot of wasted energy and work. But along with the tedium came some benefits. Gathering and chopping wood served as part of the daily rhythm that oriented, that served as a reference point for the rest of the day’s activities. The fact that the heat from the stove was available in only one room of the house meant that the entire family or community would gather in one place for the evening, would experience together whatever that evening held, whether it was reading, music, or discussion.

Or let’s take another example, that of food. Food is certainly a good that we would like to be more available in the sense I talked about before, and indeed we can make it technologically available to our societies. A frozen TV dinner is probably the easiest example to think about. The promise of a frozen TV dinner is to deliver the twin goods of nutrition and a flavor reminiscent of an actual freshly-prepared meal, but without the inconvenience of growing, harvesting, and cooking the food yourself. It is food turned into a device, instantly available. But of course for most of human history, enjoying the good of a meal was inextricably linked to engagement with the earth through farming, engagement with the community, engagement with the tradition of the culinary arts, and finally celebration and conversation with the others who were also at the table. For the sake of availability, these less quantifiable goods have been replaced by the technological mechanisms that make it possible for TV dinners to exist—industrial agriculture, chemistry, food science, etc…

Through technological innovations like central heating and instant food, we have figured out a way to deliver to ourselves what we thought we always wanted in terms of the goods of heat and food, but as a result of them becoming technological devices, we have ripped them free of the things and practices that used to be necessary for us to enjoy them. And it turns out that some of these things and practices, like manual labor, engagement with and knowledge of the natural world, the skill of cooking, or the celebration of a community, are really important for us as humans.

This isn’t the fault of technology, as if technology were some person out there trying to destroy human significance. But the Device Paradigm encourages us to think more and more in terms of means and ends rather than unified wholes, more and more in terms of devices rather than things, more and more in terms of quantifiable commodities rather than qualitative or unquantifiable goods, and more and more in terms of individual consumption rather than collective creativity.

So let me bring it back to the Internet of Things. Am I saying that the things in our lives shouldn’t be more connected, that we should stop writing JavaScript to control physical hardware, otherwise we’ll ruin society? No! I’m simply trying to get us to recognize that the driving force of technology, the Device Paradigm, entirely ignores the hard-to-define unquantifiable goods that make up human significance. I want us to ask a few questions before we wave our magic technology wand over something that looks like a problem, to make sure that in solving it, we’re doing so in such a way that leaves us just as human as we were before.

Speaking of being human, let’s talk for a minute about the Quantified Self. The technologist Jaron Lanier has a great book called You Are Not a Gadget that I think addresses this topic in a much better way than I can. All I want to say is that I fear the Quantified Self movement will lead to treating human beings as devices rather than persons, rather things in ourselves, and, historically, treating humans as anything other than persons has disastrous consequences. Don’t get me wrong; I love data as much as the next nerd, and I was initially inclined to jump on board this bandwagon. Track my runs so I can create reference points and understand my progress? Track my sleep so I can adjust my life to get better quality rest? Absolutely! And I think these things really are positive. The danger here is that it encourages us to think of ourselves in terms of statistics, in terms of quantifiable information that can be neatly categorized, filtered, and sorted. But we’re not like that. And it encourages us to think of others in that way as well, opening up infinite opportunity for unhelpful and meaningless comparison.

We “quantify” ourselves for the sake of software these days in a lot more ways than tracking our bio metrics. Every time we select a choice from a select box on a social networking site, we’re choosing to present a squared-off, low-fidelity version of ourselves. I don’t need to tell you that the common task of choosing a gender from a select box can be an extremely self-limiting experience for many people. But computer programs ask us to circumscribe ourselves in many more subtle ways. Just because it’s convenient for computers to think in terms of binary or mutually exclusive categories, just because it’s convenient for database queries to filter based on pre-set options, doesn’t mean this is a good way to model human identity or relationship. But humans are really good at adapting, and we’ve been really good at adapting to what has been technologically feasible or technologically easy. The result is that we have grown more like computers in our self-understanding and self-description, rather than the other way around. Did it have to be that way? No, I don’t think so. I have hope that once we stop lowering our standards to deal with computers, we’ll develop apps that we’ve put a lot more humanity into, so we can remain human while using them.

OK. In wrapping up this part of my talk, I want to reiterate that I am a technologist. From the time I was young I was impressed by the power of technology to change the world, and the possibilities for creative expression it opens up, and I still am. I loved writing code to play music on mobile devices last year! I’m not trying to get you guys to stop hacking on connected devices or social networks. What I’m trying to do is to get this community to start looking at technology, not just as a tool, not just as the obvious solution to the world’s problems, but almost as an entity in its own right, that has its own characteristic way of operating. We need to know ourselves before we engage with technology, or we will find ourselves and our creations unwittingly reshaped by it. We need to decide for ourselves what it means to live well as a human being. This is one of the classic questions of philosophy: what is the good life? I’m certainly not going to talk more about it here! I gave some hints along the way of what I think might be involved, and I’d love to engage you all in further conversation about it, but the point is that we need to go down that rabbit hole for at least a little bit if we want to answer the questions I raised about how we go about developing technologies that augment and ennoble human persons, rather than diminishing and demeaning ourselves and our neighbors.

I wanted to leave you with a concrete experience to accompany the very philosophical nature of this talk. The most symbolic thing I could think of to do was to play a new song for you guys. It’s a song I wrote with the theme of this talk in mind. I wanted to capture the idea that there is something unique about a shared physical experience, especially when it comes to music. Maybe in the future I’ll record this song, and through a number of takes maybe I’ll capture a “perfect” performance. But I think the minor variations and even missed notes in a live performance can combine themselves into an unrepeatable perfection of a totally different kind. That’s what I’d love for you to experience.

I wrote this song on an instrument I’ve barely ever played before—a Russian instrument called a Domra. Maybe some Russians in the audience can verify that this is actually a Domra! It was given to me as a gift from my dad when I was young, before I even knew how to play guitar, and I never really figured out what to do with it. I got it out a few months ago, and it has a soft, gentle sound that made me want to play it for you guys.

I’m going to do something a little different during this song. I’m putting a URL on the screen, and I’d love for you all to go there now on your laptops or on your mobile devices. It’s a mini app that asks you to enter one word that describes how you’re feeling (notice that it’s a text field and not a select box!). I thought we could try an experiment together, to make this experience even more unique. As I play the song, submit the words you’ve chosen, and the words will be animated on the screen up here in real time. You can update them in real time as well, so the words can change over the course of the song. I have two simple requests: first, please be honest. Second, please don’t be a troll. I know anonymity on the Internet almost guarantees someone will want to write something obscene, but I have higher expectations of this community. I’d love to have you experience this with me.

[Song, working title: Planned Obsolescence]

My eyes falter, drop their gaze Doubt enfolds me in its haze

When will you come to me? When will I know your name? When will I feel that this is real?

All I have are shreds of faith These simulations I have made

I need a solid truth Planted in solid ground Something I can’t exchange for

A newer model wrapped in a box Planned obsolescence in my soul, so

There is life in our difference Bringing out what I cannot know of myself But the mountains have been laid low And all Others are gone from experience

There was a meaning here I swear But I can’t see it any more

I’m just putting one last slide up with some resources you might want to take a look at if this topic interests you. A couple books I mentioned, as well as my blog, where I write about this stuff periodically. Also, the little Meteor app I created for the live experience is open-source, up on GitHub. Take a look!

Have a great rest of your conference everyone.

This chapter is the first of four on the relationship of technology to social and political issues. Borgmann is trying to argue that we should conceive of and judge society and politics in the light of technology, and that it is in social life or politics that the device paradigm must finally be discussed, since these areas of life are those that receive the most attention. Unfortunately, the fundamental modus operandi of technology is not yet recognized in this sphere.

What is recognized is what we might call the problem of orientation, in other words the widespread feelings of disorientation, ungroundedness, and directionlessness prevalent in modern society. Technology has rendered all points in space and time equal (determined by consumptive intent and consumptive potentiality). This itself flows from the abstract, objective viewpoint of modern science—science might be able to describe all the places and events with which we interface, but it cannot tell us which is “home”; it cannot locate meaning for us in a privileged place or time. Of course, this is not a critique of science in general. Rather, it is technology as a social strategy which redraws human experience in this world with no guideposts.

The way people address this widely-recognized if poorly-understood malaise is often to, in Borgmann’s terms, “raise the value question”. In other words, it is thought that what is needed to reorient our society is a clarification and perhaps reprioritization of “values”. According to Borgmann, however, (and laying aside the issue of the multiplicity of values), this strategy is futile in unmasking the device paradigm and showing it for what it is. The problem is that, very often, our discussion of values presupposes the means/ends distinction which is operative as a result of the technological paradigm; from this assumption, technology itself will never be able to be brought into clear relief (as we saw in earlier chapters). In modern education, the ends are what are seen as stable, and the means as radically interchangeable. Thus we have undergone a shift from education as passing down customs or “ways of doing things” to teaching goal-formulation and practical reason, with the result that tools and practices become mere means rather than vessels of orientation, used in a web of pre-existing meaning.

Ultimately, in this environment, the values we most want to bring to the fore will forever be impossible to formulate. When commoditization potential becomes the measure of whether the means are leading to the ends, the non-quantifiable “values” will start to dematerialize. As Borgmann puts it, we can measure the number of Big Macs sold, or the number of times a family eats out. But how are we to measure the value of a family meal, prepared with care and celebrated with conversation? So-called “focal things”, which we encountered earlier as those things which are a source of full-facultied human engagement, cannot be argued for in the “values” conversation, when it continues to presuppose the paradigm of technology.

In this chapter, Borgmann also considers a Marxist critique of modern society, to see whether it fares any better in bringing to light the working of the device paradigm. Ultimately, he disregards the critique as too shallow. On the Marxist story, there is always a definite class with undue power, influence, and wealth. What is really necessary is to divest this class of their privilege and distribute their benefits more equally. (There are of course totally capitalist versions of this thesis, and Borgmann goes into some interesting detail on how this a big part of the social theory underlying much of the latent political understanding in the US.) The problem here is not just that it is questionable whether there is really a definite class who can be thus Robin-Hooded. It is that technology and the device paradigm can be used quite happily towards this goal of “equality”, all the while continuing the trend of commoditization and disengagement. As long as technology operates in a free and equal manner, the Marxist has no more to say about it; and of course, this disburdenment and equality is part and parcel of the very promise of technology.

So, it appears we need more tools or insight to bring an actual discussion of technology into the political and social arena. We begin this task in the next chapter by looking at the concept of “liberal democracy” (the kind of social theory Borgmann claims is actually operative in the US political system).

One of the foundational aims of Borgmann’s whole book is the attempt to actually give an explanation for technology. Hence we discussed what counts as an explanation in the scientific realm in earlier chapters. In this middle section of the book, Borgmann is concerned to substantiate the notion of the Device Paradigm, not just as a feature of technology but as a way of explaining technology and everything that goes along with it.

This chapter is therefore about “paradigmatic explanation”—we have this “device paradigm”, but what does it mean for this concept to be an explanation of technology? Borgmann begins by summarizing one type of explanation: “apodeictic” explanation, or the kind used in science. And of course, it is the physical sciences which in our society provide the standard for explanation. But science, Borgmann argues, fails to provide a theory, “in the sense of a steady and arresting view of our world” (69). Scientific laws may tell us what is possible, but they do not tell us what is relevant. There is, in other words, an overabundance of “givenness”, of things we could pay attention to or bring into focus or care about. Science itself does not and cannot set that vision for us.

The same kind of explanations are sought in the social sciences as in the physical sciences. Borgmann shows a set of pairs that typify this distinction:

isoughtfactvaluetheoreticalpracticalanalysisadvocacyempiricalnormative

Scientific, apodeictic, subsumptive modes of explanation focus on the first column. But there must then be other kinds of explanation that focus on the second column or the whole picture. Borgmann therefore introduces the concept of “deictic” explanation, which answers the question “What is significant?” rather than the question “What is?” But is there yet a third possibility? Borgmann believes there is: paradigmatic explanation.

Borgmann defines paradigmatic explanation as “explanation by elucidation of a predominant pattern”, and says that, compared to apodeictic and deictic modes, this would be considered “paradeictic” or “quasi-deictic”, since it does not shy away from looking at patterns that bleed into the second column above, patterns that are used as a guide to sort out the world. Combined with the concept of a paradigm, we are talking of using concrete examples of patterns to prove the existence of a larger, overriding pattern.

So the Device Paradigm, as paradigmatic explanation, is designed to bring into relief the force that “more and more detaches us from the persons, things, and practices that used to engage and grace us in their own right” (76). From a historical perspective, this is the story of life being seen as toil, poverty, and suffering, and technology entering the scene as natural science promising to transform our experience and liberate us. The deep irony is then that disburdenment becomes disengagement.

So what examples can we use as paradigms to bring to light the pattern above? Well, we have already considered many of them. A fireplace becomes a central heating system. A wagon becomes an automobile. A meal becomes a TV dinner. The pattern here is of Things (objects which have depth as a result of being part of the web of human significance) becoming Commodities (wherein the main benefit they provide is stripped from the thing itself and made available).

When we build up from these paradigm cases, Borgmann claims, and if we are at all concerned about the disengagement characteristic of modern life, then the Device Paradigm provides an extremely clear explanation for how technology serves as an “implicit guiding pattern for the transformation of this world”.

The point of this chapter, according to Borgmann, is to provide more rigor around what has thus far been an intuitive account of the device paradigm. He begins with the question of whether there are any competing analyses of it on offer. In fact, critiques of what might be considered technology have been around since the time of, say, the introduction of the steam engine. For critics of this period, the symbol of technology was the “machine” they saw altering the landscape around them. The steam engine was ambivalent: it was powerful and convenient, but also “ravenous”, consuming land, resources, and quiet. Writers of this persuasion, Borgmann claims, framed their arguments in terms of a means/end imbalance, where the danger was that our technological means (the machines) might unwittingly become our ends. (The solution would then be to correct this balance.)

A more recent critic, Hannah Arendt, criticizes technology on the basis of a different distinction than means vs. ends. She counterposes two perspectives on the story of human life: the first is characterized as “work and action”, and the second as “labor and consumption”. What “work and action” means is a bit vague, but the point is that both work and action are noble and humanizing pursuits. What is available to us in our technological age, however, is “labor and consumption”, that is, the essence of work as unpleasant toil which merely provides the resources for a consumptive existence. Both halves of this second mode contribute to a lack of meaning and are dehumanizing.

Borgmann’s reaction to Arendt is measured; he appreciates the argument but thinks there is a better distinction to be had, one based on the technological goal of “disburdenment”. I take it that he means there is a distinction between two perspectives on life: one (the technological) based on the idea of continual and progressive disburdenment, and another (Borgmann’s) based on some other paradigm (yet to be disclosed).

Borgmann’s reaction to the means/end arguments is somewhat more lively, in that he repudiates it as granting too much ground already. Modern proponents of this kind of argument claim that our technological means have not so much become our ends as overrun our ends, bringing about what Borgmann calls “reverse adaptation”, wherein the technological possibilities are so expansive we adapt our ends to the shape they give reality, rather than vice versa. While not false, framing the discussion in this way leaves it open for the thoughtful technologist to respond that yes, this is a problem, and what is needed is simply a clarification of our ends! What goes unnoticed here is that everyone is inclined to view the state of affairs from within this distinction of means vs. ends, which itself is in fact new, and is itself a product of the rise of technology. One way of talking about the device paradigm on this view is that technology is also in the business of radically redefining our goals or ends. But Borgmann goes beyond this and quotes Thomas Carlyle to the effect that we actually do violence to things when we divide them into means and ends.

And unfortunately this is precisely what the device paradigm encourages us to do: “We must recognize that the reduction of the fullness of phenomena in technological measurement and assessment is no more alarming than the common attenuation of the depth of things to commodious surfaces” (61). In other words, this classification of means and ends is a philosophical reflection of the overall pattern of technology, which splits things themselves down the middle, into commodious surfaces on one side and black boxes that produce the commodities on the other. This is deeply worrying, because “commodities allow no engagement and atrophy the fullness of our capacities” (62).

So, in sum, others have seen the device paradigm in action and traced its outline, but Borgmann is unsatisfied with other analyses of it, especially when they use the means/ends distinction, which itself is part of what he claims needs to be analysed. Instead, Borgmann wants to give a “paradigmatic” explanation; what exactly that means and how it works will be the subject of the next chapter.

In this chapter, Borgmann explores what he calls the Foreground of technology. This is essentially the world of the use (i.e., consumption) of technological devices, rather than the world of their construction or operation. As we are all aware, technology results in a large set of commodities, and the “Foreground” is the world of their consumption. The Foreground is invoked, Borgmann says, when conversation turns to the topics of “leisure, consumption, or the standard of living” (48).

The Device Paradigm is key to understanding the Foreground, since it explicitly describes the delineation between Foreground and Background through the distinction between a piece of technological machinery and the commodity that machinery is designed to produce. Interestingly, it is not just in “machines” that we see this pattern operating, but also in nature, culture, and other areas of human life. Wine, for example, has been slowly converted to a device, according to the definition of a device under the Device Paradigm. Rather than being something which is an unanalyzable whole, inseparable from its physical and cultural context, we now think of wine dualistically. One on hand it is the collection of chemicals which constitute its physical structure. On the other hand, it is a collection of color, odor, viscosity, and taste properties. What Borgmann claims is that because of the technological advances in winemaking, we are free to focus on one (the commodity, or foreground, of wine-stimuli) as consumers, while ignoring the other (the particular physical characteristics of the wine, which can be tweaked just so in order to provide the desired commodity). It used to be the case that a particular wine would “open up” a world—the world of its soil, its country, its experiences, etc…—but when features of wine are free to vary independent of context, that world is no longer opened up. We are experiencing the mere commodity, at that point, of a technological device.

Borgmann points out that this state of affairs is not a result of modern science. As noted in a previous chapter, science renders physical phenomena clear and more knowable, but it does not by itself provide a pattern for action. The pattern which is responsible for the shift in our approach to wine is a result instead of the Device Paradigm. Of course, science is necessary for all of this to take place, but it is not the root cause of it. Borgmann sees the new situation with wine as an example of a general trend, that from a taste for ’things’ to a taste for ‘commodities’. We are, essentially, focusing on the pleasing surface elements of things while disregarding everything else, which paves the way for those things to be replaced by devices.

Another clear example is that of frozen meals—they are essentially aggregates of commodities, not things connected to specific places, people, seasons, times, and experiences, the way meals unavoidably were in pre-technological settings. Interestingly, they are presented to us as though they were connected in this way, which brings up a major aspect of the Foreground of technology, namely advertisement. It is such a part of our age that Daniel Boorsin has called it “the characteristic rhetoric of democracy” (52). Borgmann is careful to say that our consumer culture isn’t the effect of advertising, but the other way around: advertising is necessary for a consumer culture, and that in turn is simply the outworking of the promise of technology (i.e., consumption is the natural mode in an abundance of commodities). Borgmann quotes several authors who discuss precisely what advertising is, making interesting points along the way about the nature of commodities. Borgmann himself wants to be clear that what makes something a commodity is not a psychological fact (i.e., how a certain person approaches something like a TV dinner), but rather an ontological fact (i.e., the product’s construction and structure, or how it conforms to the Device Paradigm).

Advertising is then a classically Foreground activity, since it is designed to make us aware of the commodious aspects of devices. It does use traditional modes of engagement as a kind of fuel, in order for the surface aspects of the commodity to connect with our desires or, commonly, nostalgia. Thus the pictures on the boxes of TV dinners show the meal presented in a traditional context, on a table, surrounded by fine dining implements or fresh vegetables, even though the actual product is completely dissimilar to that picture. Borgmann asks the question of how tenuous these links can become before the fuel of tradition is exhausted. It’s a question not so much of similarity or dissimilarity but of how much we end up caring about things vs commodities. Another way to look at the question is to ask whether a completely simulated experience which differs in no way from the “real” equivalent is any less desirable than the real thing. Increasingly, the attitude in our culture is that there is no difference. As Borgmann says on p. 56:

What is philosophically remarkable and evident even now is that there is a widespread and easy acceptance of equivalence between commodities and things even where the experiential differences are palpable. People who have traveled through Glacier Park in an air-conditioned motor home, listening to soft background music and having a cup of coffee, would probably answer affirmatively and without qualification when asked if they knew the park, had been in the park, or had been through the park. Such people have not felt the wind of the mountains, have not smelled the pines, have not heard the red-tailed hawk, have not sensed the slopes in their legs and lungs, have not experienced the cycle of day and night in the wilderness. The experience has not been richer than one gained from a well-made film viewed in suburban Chicago.

If the ends are all that matter, and if the ends result in equivalent mental states, then it will indeed be increasingly difficult to find any reason to have a “real” experience over a commoditized or simulated one. There are, Borgmann points out, counter-movements, among which he lists “voluntary simplicity”, “arts & crafts”, and, interestingly, “running” (which, when he wrote in 1984, was much less of a cultural fad than it is today!). Almost 30 years after he wrote, I think we can see even more clearly the distinction between these two types of movements, along with various interesting ways people have tried to combine them (e.g., the fascination with ’local’ foods and products, but the simultaneous application of industrial, technological viewpoints to their growth and adoption via social media or other means).

In the next chapter, we’ll take a step closer to the Background of technology and examine devices and machines more philosophically.

At this point in our exploration of the relationship between modern science and technology, what can we say with confidence? First, that modern science shows us that the world exists in a large matrix of possible states of affairs. The space of these possibilities is defined by the world’s initial conditions: given some physical state of affairs in the past, our world is one of its possible subsequent states. Technology can then be seen to “[reflect] a determination to act transformatively on these possibilities” (27). In other words, science tells us what’s physically possible and through technology we decide to act on them in order to change the world. In these roles, both science and technology share a problem: there is no principled way, using only their own resources, to decide what to explain or what to transform.

To illustrate this, we can return to our example of winemaking. Modern science makes the process of fermentation more and more perspicuous, more clear to our understanding. With that clarity we can see which parts of winemaking are laborious, which chemicals lead to bad taste, and even how harmful byproducts might be introduced. This knowledge opens the door to a technological intervention—we might, for example, choose to use tools which speed up the fermentation process or which reduce harmful byproducts. But where should we draw the line in modifying the traditional process? At what point does technologically optimized wine stop becoming wine?

Borgmann says that the general public, though it has limited understanding of science and of the details of technological transformation, intuitively grasps at least what we have been saying so far: science illuminates possibilities of dealing with the world, and through technology we make them actual. But some people go further and argue that modern science in its explanatory slide has actually ushered in a new worldview. Those who agree with this claim differ in whether it’s a good or bad thing, but Borgmann wants to call the premise into question. There are three arguments he sees for this thesis that science itself has ushered in a new worldview:

1. Science was in historical fact a liberating event (from superstition to true understanding, etc…), therefore it has delivered a new and concrete way of engaging with the world.
2. Scientists are held to unparalleled standards of correctness and achievement, therefore what is active is a new worldview.
3. The chaos in our world comes from a failure to follow scientific ideals through completely, therefore science must embody a distinct worldview.

Of the three arguments, he only considers the first (which he considers to be the strongest) in detail. It is true that as scientific theories advance, real and well-documented clashes occur. When these clashes are against the powers of the day, the clash is seen as a revolution and science is typically on the side of liberation. But, as Borgmann points out, science in this role is always a liberation from, not a liberation for. What he means is that by casting sufficient doubt on established ideas, science can provide incentive to revolt, but it can never produce a substantive framework of its own, out of its own resources.

Here Borgmann draws upon the idea of deictic resources (world-articulation, rather than world-explanation): “Withdrawal of scientific endorsement forces a worldview back to its deictic resources” (29). If that worldview has no deictic resources, it may very well perish (as we have seen with alchemy). But strongly deictic disciplines such as poetry and art do not, predictably, disappear with the advance of science, since they are not in the business of world-explanation. For this reason Borgmann declares the scuffle between science and theology to be pointless—science is not satisfyingly deictic enough to warrant the discarding of theology, which can provide concrete orientation for our lives.

The main point is that science as a sociological phenomenon cannot guide us from within its own center (i.e., its laws and theories), but must lean upon external resources for leadership. That doesn’t mean, however, that science cannot rise in power without those guiding resources. And this approach, like a car with the driver asleep at the wheel, can have disastrous consequences. We might engage technology as the inevitable outgrowth of a science that sees reality as an infinite manifold of pure, moldable substance, begging us to transform it. Borgmann is not quite so pessimistic, however, and reminds us that it is possible to distinguish the scientific method (i.e., the heart of science’s laws and theories) from the worldview just expressed. This enables us to separate science from technology and find a place for science without viewing technology as necessarily having the same privileged status (a status which flows from true explanation). Science is a necessary precursor to a technological age, but it is not a sufficient condition for it.

How then can we explicate technology if not as a necessary consequence of science? Borgmann believes we need to begin by looking at the fundamental pattern of technology. We will do that when we transition to Part 2, which begins with the next chapter, “The Promise of Technology”.

In this chapter we examine how far the validity of scientific explanation (the style of explanation called deductive-nomological) extends. Can there be any objections to the claim that scientific explanation is the proper mode of explanation for every question? Borgmann discusses such objections to both the necessity and sufficiency of scientific explanation.

Borgmann sees the objection to necessity (i.e., the objection which says scientific explanation is not necessary for true explanation) as relatively weak. The argument he offers for this view is that historians give valid explanations of unique events. They don’t try to reduce the cause of WWI to basic scientific principles, but that doesn’t mean answers referring to the Ottoman Empire are somehow invalid. This is true, Borgmann says, but not a good argument, since the core of scientific explanation is subsumption under a lawful pattern. Presumably, if pushed, the historian would also explain the actions of states and individuals with reference to laws of human behavior or politics. Thus this objection is not in principle an objection to scientific explanation, only (at most) to the cogency of trying to reduce complex historical data to physics (a task I agree is fruitless).

Three objections to sufficiency (i.e., objections which says scientific explanation is not, in every case, enough to provide true explanation on its own) are given more weight. First, it has already been noted by Carl Hempel (a philosopher of science) that scientific explanation gives an answer to a why-question, but not to a request to explain a concrete thing or event. “Explain the Northern Lights” is simply not a sensible thing to say in the deductive-nomological framework (it is questions like “Why are the northern lights such-and-such a color?” that are countenanced by the framework). So it seems we may have explanatory desires that outstrip the power of scientific explanation. Borgmann calls explanations of these questions deictic: they satisfy our desire to know things themselves in their cosmological/ontological setting, not just why things have certain features or behave in certain ways given their ontological settings (in Chapter 5, Borgmann introduced the term apodeictic to describe this latter kind of explanation).

Second, Borgmann points out that any explanandum (any thing to be explained) exists in a nexus of a complex causal network. So “it is clear that when an explanation disregards that aspect of the event that is of concern to me, it fails to satisfy my need to understand” (23). What he is pointing out is that a given event can be subsumed under a great many laws and generate a great many simultaneously-valid explanations. Borgmann gives the example of observing a hawk sitting on a post watching a squirrel. Soon, the hawk leaves. If we ask, “why was the hawk sitting 5 feet from the squirrel?” we can give an answer based on geometry (utilizing the Pythagorean theorem and the height of the post) or based on ecology and the laws of animal behavior (saying, for example, “perhaps the hawk wasn’t hungry”). Scientific explanation itself does not tell us which one of these explanations is useful, suitable, or desirable. Thus there is always a (non-scientific) element of selective judgment in choosing the appropriate kind of explanation.

Third, Borgmann points out that science has not been able to successfully explain itself, on three levels. There is no scientific explanation of (a) how scientific laws are discovered, (b) how problems get stated clearly enough to be explained scientifically, and (c) how science makes actual progress in our understanding of the world. Clearly, each of these is a question eminently worthy of explanation, and explanations have been proposed, but none with a deductive-nomological character.

Borgmann draws an interesting connection between “progress” in science and the concept of deictic explanation. Progress in modern science is marked by “improvements in the scope, precision, and consistency of [its] laws” (23). The dramatic increase in precision sets modern science apart from its ancient counterparts. Aristotle’s laws, for example, had deductive-nomological character, while at the same time articulating a single, comprehensive vision of the world, encompassing (even) ethics and metaphysics. Borgmann claims that the sharpening of scientific precision causes it to increasingly divest itself of deictic power, choosing “world-explanation” over “world-articulation”.

That the deictic power of the sciences has waned is not a failure in general. Deictic disciplines still exist: “Art has always been the supreme deictic discourse” (26), and at times philosophy, religion, or politics. But in our modern society, it is not artists or philosophers who are called on in a crisis. Thus if the character of modern scientific explanation fails to provide the “orientation” needed for real political action, a worrying gap can be seen between apodeictic science and our deictic heritage.

Borgmann does not make explicit at this point where technology fits into this picture. I take it, however, that it is of paramount importance, since technology, viewed as the concrete outworking of a tacitly-assumed scientific worldview, is often heralded as a vehicle for human political/social progress. We therefore need an explanation of technology which sheds light on the “gap” mentioned above. In other words, we must not assume that a scientific explanation of technology will be satisfying or even forthcoming. Borgmann wants to propose instead what he calls a “paradigmatic” explanation of technology (wherein technology’s essence is explained by looking at the typical or paradigmatic pattern of technology). We’ll begin that discussion when we look at Chapter 7, “Science & Technology”.

Chapter 5 of TCCL is concerned with the validity of scientific explanation. Borgmann contrasts this with the scope of scientific explanation, which will be discussed in the next chapter. The example which runs throughout the chapter is the process of grape juice turning into wine. It’s a great example for discussing scientific explanation since it exemplifies the power of it (how it unlocks an understanding of the chemical and microbiological processes underlying fermentation) in the context of something paradigmatically cultural or taste-oriented.

How does grape juice turn into wine? It has commonly been known for quite some time that the combination of yeast and a sugar solution results in alcohol, but fermentation as a chemical formula was first described in 1810 by Guy-Lussac: C6H12O6 = 2C2H5OH + 2CO2. These symbols exhibit one important aspect of the drive to scientific explanation: it begins by asking questions and naming the subdivisions of entities. Yeast isn’t just yeast—there are many kinds. Likewise with alcohol. So the formula “yeast + sugar = alcohol” is too simple. The formula is also open to the obvious question of how the process takes place! Do yeasts turn sugar into alcohol by ingesting it or by some kind of mechanical manipulation? With the advent of the microscope, we cannot refuse scientific experimentation’s invitation to “look and see”—and when we do, we find answers to our questions (along with new questions and puzzles). Proof of the power of asking questions lies in the fact that we do not typically refer to Dionysius or the principle of spontaneous change when asked about grape juice turning into wine, as the ancients did. We are familiar enough with scientific explanation to assume that there must be one for this process.

The big picture of scientific explanation is an inexorable slide from larger observations and laws to more fine-grained ones. Scientific explanation is essentially the systematization of the child’s endlessly asking “Why?” And unlike most adults, reality does not respond with “Just because! Now stop asking questions.” There is always, of course, a “floor” to the questions we can ask, a place where we must say “we don’t know” and live, at least for a time, with mystery. But importantly, there is no reason to assume that that floor is immovable, or not subject to further “whys”. This is essentially an argument for scientific realism, the position that the explanatory slide is taking us on a journey through levels of reality.

Scientific realism isn’t the only perspective one can take in the philosophy of science; scientific instrumentalists, for example, point out the striking differences in language and explanatory level between the experience of fermentation (seeing and smelling a frothy wine must) and the descriptions of nuclear physics (where the process we call “fermentation” is so far above the level of quarks and nuons as to disappear completely). Instrumentalists thus want to draw a line between the tangible world and reductionistic, “abstract” science. Borgmann comes down solidly on the side of scientific realism (albeit with strong criticism waiting in the wings). He doesn’t think it’s possible for the instrumentalists to draw a principled line between “experiential reality” and “abstract science”. The language can certainly be strikingly different, and bodily experiencing fermentation is certainly nothing like reading up on nuclear physics, but this doesn’t mean that there isn’t an underlying reality insightfully explored by the latter. Nor is it an argument against the validity of scientific explanation that there are some things it hasn’t explained. The undeniable trend is that explanatory challenges (when clearly defined) are progressively met within the scientific paradigm.

In practice, the modern world is not instrumentalist; it does see pretty much everything as existing within the purview of scientific explanation. But Borgmann wants to draw a sharp distinction between the validity of scientific explanation (whether and how we should accept scientific reasoning) and its scope (the questions with which we can be confident the validity holds). So far we’ve been setting the groundwork for an argument for the validity; scope will be discussed in Chapter 6.

The time has come to define our terms more precisely. What is scientific explanation in the first place? It begins with the observation that our world is lawfully ordered, and our reality intelligible. One such intelligible regularity is must (a yeast + grape juice solution) turning to wine. That the regularity holds is an observation; it is explained when we can see it as one instance of a general law. Thus a scientific explanation of phenomenon X consists in showing how X regularly occurs according to law Y in context Z. Then we can say that X is subsumed under Y. Intuitively, this gives insight about the particular instances of X we find in the world.

This kind of explanation is called deductive nomological explanation, where the explanation consists in a logical argument flowing from lawlike premises combined with the observation at hand, to produce a conclusion. The premises are called the explanans (the bits which do the explaining), and the conclusion is called the explanandum (the observation to be explained). Interestingly, on this view, when we want to explain phenomenon X, we treat X as the conclusion of an argument, and are committed to finding true premises which lead to X. Borgmann calls these kind of explanations apodeictic explanations, since they have the force of logic. If they are clearly stated, it is easy to assess their logical validity, and if valid, they stand as solid explanations of a given phenomenon.

Deductive nomological explanation, formalized in this way, seems far removed from our normal sense of “explanation”, but Borgmann claims the opposite: “To understand a particular event in seeing it within the framework of regularities is the common and pervasive way in which humans orient themselves in their world” (22). Sowing seeds is an activity based on experiencing the regularity of plant growth, eating food relies on our belief in its regular restorative abilities, and so on. “Grape juice turns to wine in the presence of yeast and given other conditions” is precisely a deductive nomological explanation. Thus science is merely the (admittedly radical) sharpening of the kind of thinking which humans have used since the dawn of the species.

Analyzing reality with increasing precision is the particular hallmark of “modern” science, which, with the precision narrowing to the suboptical, grows increasingly removed from everyday experience. These differences can be put succinctly:

The Everyday WorldThe Matrix of Scientific KnowledgeOpacity
We see things in their externalities, not essences.vs.Perspicuity
Nature’s inner workings become clearMolar
We see things on a scale tuned to human perception.vs.Microscopic
Explanations refer to entities below the level of human perception.Diversity
The world around us is rich in variety, no two things appear identical.vs.Sameness
Millions of animal species, but only ~115 elements in the periodic table.

Despite the tendency of science to reductionism, it should be made clear that what science discloses to us is a rich, highly connected network of systems that make up our world: geological, biological, and ecological systems all interact in a way that highlights the interconnectedness of reality. As Borgmann puts it, “This is the explanatory power of science: it explains everything more precisely and more generally than any prior mode of explanation” (22).

It should follow, then, that science can provide a precise explanation of technology. But this has not been done. Is such an explanation forthcoming? To answer that question, we must first decide whether such an explanation is in principle possible. We saw how with questions about the natural world there is every reason to think explanations are always possible in principle. But the question of technology may be fundamentally different, and we cannot assume that the scope of scientific explanation covers every conceivable question. The next chapter will deal with this issue, and spend time adding nuance to the view of science so far espoused.

In this chapter we begin to look at the relationship of science and technology, by initiating an inquiry into the nature of science. Borgmann spends much of this brief chapter painting a rough picture of what people say and think about science. This outline of popular sentiment is important since much of Borgmann’s work is devoted to critically examining common worldviews: “The entire exercise will of course be pointless if no attempt is made to expose today’s normal world citizenship to criticism, to expose its inconsistencies and liabilities, and strengthen its proudest aspirations” (17).

Any theory of technology must deal with science since it is crucially dependent on science; without that aspect of human history, the technological paradigm would not exist. Technology can also in some sense be thought of as being in competition with science: science sets the standard of explanation in our time, and Borgmann’s theory of technology may fall under a different standard. (As we will see in later chapters, what exactly a “scientific” explanation even consists of is a problematic question).

From the perspective of some kind of sociological intuition, it can be presupposed that people today generally try to give what they consider scientific explanations rather than looking to the wrath of God or flying dragons to explain phenomena. Does this fit with empirical sociological data? Unfortunately, surveys which obtain this data accurately are hard to formulate and/or find. Borgmann’s view is that there is no “clear and common notion” of science, either in the public or in the scientific community. (Anecdotally, my experience is that the philosophy of science (the field which looks at the grounding claims of scientific reasoning and principles) is more or less unknown to scientists as well as non-scientists).

Empirically, we can say a few things:

• The public’s command of scientific facts is extremely minimal (i.e., science is an external authority; the actual knowledge is not owned by people themselves).
• People generally think highly of science.
• People respect and trust science more the more they are acquainted with it. (Implying that it proves satisfying in some regard, in some context).
• One study suggests that people take a “scientific” view when they’re in command of their situation, and resort to religion for explanations when there are no available scientific ones.

Facts like these help to address a question which is of primary importance: with what degree of insight does the average citizen of modern technological society apprehend their world? In other words, how deep, nuanced, and structured are people’s worldviews in general? If it turns out that most people have a thin and undifferentiated veneer of “science” slathered on top of not much else, then there is ample room for a critique of modern culture (and its uncritical appropriation of the device paradigm) on that basis.

In order to dive into the confusion Borgmann claims most people have about science, he wants to initially divide the term into three senses (which normally are not distinguished):

1. Science as a human, social enterprise
2. Science as a body of established laws and theories
3. Science in its applied form

These three sciences have vastly different features and descriptions. Science as a social enterprise is subject to all the vagaries of any such enterprise: ambition, heroism, treachery, jealousy, diligence, etc… In other words, in this sense science is no more privileged than business or politics or religion, as their practitioners will all exhibit similar classes of moral behavior.

Science as a body of established laws and theories, on the other hand, has a valid claim to objectivity. The content of a theory is independent of its human origin, and can be proved or disproved in the same way. How scientific laws are used doesn’t change their fundamental essence: they properly attempt only to describe nature. As Borgmann says, “It makes no difference to the validity of a scientific law whether it has been discovered by a Jesuit or a Communist and whether it is applied to kill or to cure” (17). (Of course, which theories gain funding and support is emphatically not an objective fact).

It’s this aspect of science that Borgmann wants to distinguish sharply from technology, and we’ll spend more time looking at it in future chapters. In particular, under the supposedly objective nature of scientific laws, there lurk deep philosophical problems not faced by the everyday proponent of a “scientific” worldview. Do all scientific theories have an equal claim to cogency and objectivity? What standard of explanation is relevant when comparing them?

Science in its applied form is most akin to what we mean by technology. It arises as a possibility from scientific laws, and both draws energy from and feeds energy into science as a social project. Borgmann is not sure that technology is merely applied science, however, and this will become clear in future chapters.

In Chapter 5, we will look at the topic of scientific explanation: how a given theory can be said to be explanatory, and what principles are proposed for distinguishing competing theories which all seem to have some claim to validity.

In this chapter, Borgmann is concerned to shore up the validity of the distinction between the substantive, instrumental, and pluralist views of technology. These distinctions carve up the possible theoretical space in a certain way, and Borgmann concedes that any such classification is going to suppress some aspects of reality and highlight others. We therefore need to be mindful of this in selecting a space within which to develop a theory of technology, and it’s open to anyone to ask whether Borgmann’s categorization is the best, or even a good, one.

What Borgmann gives us in Chapter 3 is essentially a case study: he examines a different classification of ideas about technology, namely that of Carl Mitcham. In comparing the features of Mitcham’s distinctions and their fruitfulness for providing an appropriate arena for asking and answering questions about technology, Borgmann is trying to convince us that we should stick with his picture. He does this with a measure of humility; he does not critique Mitcham’s classification (in fact much of the chapter praises it) so much as point out where it leaves residual areas of potential confusion.

Mitcham makes the same basic distinction Borgmann did, between the narrow sense of technology as engineering science and the broad sense of it in all its interfaces with society. The subsequent challenge Mitcham takes up is to address whether technology may be thought of as an “all-pervasive approach” to human affairs. (In other words, technology is one instance of a more inclusive phenomenon). He rejects this “radical” thesis, deciding that technology is rather “the human making and using of material artifacts in all forms and aspects” (13). (Here Borgmann says as an aside that the above challenge is the basis of his introduction of the distinction between the substantive and instrumental views). That technology is a “making” implies that it is not a “doing” in the Aristotelian sense (where human “doing” encompasses political, moral, and religious action), though Borgmann questions whether this distinction is even valid in modern society, given that “making” has so eclipsed “doing” in general.

Mitcham sees three major dimensions of technology: the subjective (or material, i.e., pertaining to the actual substances and methods of technology), the functional (or structural, i.e., the essential aspects of technology), and the social (or historical, i.e., technology as a social, historical enterprise). For Mitcham the functional dimension is the one we least understand, and he further subdivides it into technology-as-knowledge, technology-as-process, and technology-as-product. These correspond to three canonical philosophical entities: thoughts, activities, and objects, respectively. These distinctions in hand, Mitcham tries to address deeper questions of the essence of technology, and finds that he needs a fourth aspect (technology-as-volition, i.e., technology with respect to our will about ourselves and the world) in order to address the supreme question of whether technology fits our deepest aspirations or not. In Borgmann’s words, this question can be paraphrased by the possible answers to it: “Is technology a powerful instrument in the service of our values, a force in its own right that threatens our essential welfare, or is there perhaps no clear problem of technology at all, merely an interplay of numerous & variable tendencies?” (15)

For Borgmann, Mitcham’s multi-tiered classification of technology obscures as much as it illuminates, and he thinks the core questions are addressed better by the substantive/instrumental/pluralist distinctions. These distinctions form a set of competing tensions—no one viewpoint can be correct, he says, because modern technology is too complex. Within their defining boundaries, then, what can we discern as the fundamental pattern of technology? That is the task at hand. One major obstacle in pursuing this task is the lack of a “principled understanding of science.” Science and technology are usually thought of in the same vein (or as essentially identical approaches to knowledge and action, respectively), but Borgmann claims this is a fatally misleading assumption, and will spend the next few chapters discussing the relationship between these two concepts.

Chapter 2 of TCCL consists of an overview of several existing theories of technology that Borgmann wants to use as partners in dialogue, in the process of constructing his own theory. The pre-theoretic, simplistic view of technology is pragmatic: science and technology have proven their validity and usefulness through the effective solutions they boast to real problems. Since it is obvious that technology has indeed solved such problems, any more nuanced theory will have to be presented with the utmost precision and care. (Here I think Borgmann is justifying the level of detail he will be going into in this section of the book).

In the simplistic “default” view, technology is basically “applied science and engineering” (8). By this Borgmann is saying people generally think of technology merely as what happens when scientists and engineers do work in the world. He claims this leaves technology too narrowly defined: there is no room for fruitful inquiry into technology’s deeper essence if it is defined purely functionally. So a real theory of technology would offer a more engaging perspective.

Borgmann sees three broad approaches to developing a theory of technology:

1. The substantive approach. On this view, technology is a force in its own right. It isn’t understood as a personal force, but just something which is not reducible to other principles. In other words, it’s a basic element of modern existence, rather than something which is explained by reference to other elements. As a matter of practice, most substantivists tend to portray this force as negative (and so are called anti-technologist or Luddite).

   While Borgmann lauds the simplicity of this view (technology simply is) and the fact that technology as a basic force is seen to have its own characteristic essence, he thinks substantivists do not adequately meet the challenges posed by the apparent success of technology in meeting the world’s problems. Stridently declaring technology evil does not deliver the requisite insight!

2. The instrumentalist approach. This is perhaps the most common theoretical position; it sees technological devices as the evolution of the simple tools humans have been using since the dawn of our species—there is fundamentally no difference between a hammer and a computer. On this approach, Borgmann notes that the primary question concerning technology becomes: what ends are these tools used for?

   This division between ends and means finds a congenial home in our liberal democracy (by which Borgmann means this kind of democracy), wherein “it is the task of the state to provide means for the good life but … to leave to private efforts the establishment and pursuit of ultimate values” (10). In other words, the state is free to make available any kind of technological development, but not to say what kinds of ends are appropriate for their use.

   Borgmann admits that instrumentalism is on one hand true (technological devices and tools are indeed analogically related, and the distinction between ends and means is indeed a real part of our current experience), but claims it misses several important points. The first is that the distinction between ends and means itself is a novel thing which did not exist in pre-technological society. Secondly, technological “ends” consistently find their realization in supporting a ruling elite and exploiting the poor, which suggests there is something more complicated going on than the use of tools.

3. The pluralist approach. Borgmann defines this perspective rather vaguely (in my opinion), describing it basically as the position that there can be no comprehensive approach to technology; at the end of the day, all we have are anecdotes about society’s engagement with machines, and there is no discernible underlying pattern. While this approach can (technically speaking) handle every observed fact or situation, Borgmann claims it does so at the cost of failing the test of reality: technology does have a character which runs through all the instances of its use, and it moreover has a real effect on the world. As he says, “in modern technology the face of the earth is transformed in a radically novel way” (11)—I leave it to the reader to imagine all the ways the earth has been literally transformed by machines.

After this brief review, Borgmann describes the kind of theory of technology he wants to build in TCCL. It should make bold and radical claims, it should explicate the character of technology (i.e., make it easier to observe and understand), it should on one hand reflect common-sense intuitions while on the other hand avoid superficiality, and finally it should emerge from an observation of actual events and situations (i.e., it should have empirical grounding).

As we move into the next chapters, Borgmann will lay out the ground rules for developing and substantiating such a theory. For example, we’ll engage in some philosophy of science (“What is a theory, and what makes a theory good?”). We’ll also look at the relationship between technology and science—is it as close as we normally assume? We’ll begin to explore that question in Chapter 3.

In the first chapter of TCCL, Borgmann makes it clear that we need a theory of technology, not just an understanding of the practices involved in it. He says moreover that this study is going to be “philosophical”, especially in the sense of prompting “considerations of a radical and reflective sort” (7). (This was certainly my experience in reading the book). The reason we need a theory is that problems in technological societies such as ours are often seen to be extrinsic to technology. People claim that “they stem … from political indecision, social injustice, or environmental constraints” (3). According to Borgmann, this is a mistaken view. There is in fact a definite pattern to the fabric of our technologically-driven lives which elucidates the “hopes, confusions, and frustrations of the modern period” (3)—and it is intrinsically tied up with technology.

(Philosophers have historically fared no better than others in discerning this pattern because, Borgmann suggests, they often overlook the everyday foreground of our lives; and it is precisely here where the paradigmatic pattern of technology dominates.)

We need a theory of technology, and much of the book will be devoted to delivering one. So let’s begin. What is technology? It is, in sum, the dominant characteristic approach to reality in the modern world. It is seen most concretely in “devices” (TVs, cars, etc…), and showing how such devices are paradigmatic of technology is a major aim of the book.

We can give one initial example of a device: a stereo set. The reason a stereo set exists is obvious: its goal is to provide music. Of course, people who gather with instruments and play bluegrass also provide music, but a stereo set provides music (a) at any time, and (b) of any kind. A stereo set, within the boundaries of its technology, is infinitely more versatile than a group of humans with instruments, but this comes at the cost of extreme abstractness (the form of the stereo set has nothing to do with the kind of music it provides, whereas the shape and material of a fiddle has everything to do with it) and concealment (the inner workings of a stereo set are an inscrutable collection of microchips and small electronics hidden behind a plastic veil). These two features, abstractness and concealment, will be major themes in elucidating the device paradigm.

Differences like these between live musicians (pre-technologically the only way to procure music) and a stereo set flag important questions of the gains and losses of the technological approach, which will continue to provide an interesting arena for discussion.

Apart from establishing the device paradigm as a good theory of technology, the other main aim of TCCL is to discuss “focal things and practices”, in order to understand the fatal flaw in present technological rule (this is where we can see the philosophy becoming truly radical, in the sense of calling accepted sensibilities into question). What are focal things and practices? In short, they are things/practices that “center and illuminate our lives” (4). As Borgmann says, “Music certainly has that power if it is alive as a regular and skillful engagement of body and mind and if it graces us in a full and final way” (4).

A core critique of modern society, for Borgmann, is that it fundamentally lacks appreciation for the centrality of focal concerns, not to mention the tendency for technology to diminish them. (This is true even among philosophers and sociologists who study the modern era). It’s a testament to the cogency of the book, then, that this techno-junkie found deep insight in Borgmann’s claims that the device paradigm is inherently arrayed against focal concerns. But we’ve finished with chapter 1. See you next time for chapter 2, “Theories of Technology”!

PS: Some evidence that some part of Borgmann’s theory of technology resonates with technologists’ understanding of it can be found in this interesting post by Jean-Baptiste Queru on the complexity of a simple task like visiting a web page. A relevant quote which emphasizes the ‘concealment’ aspect (and the corresponding inability for most of us to diagnose and fix technological problems):

Once you start to understand how [our] modern devices work and how they’re created, it’s impossible to not be dizzy about the depth of everything that’s involved, and to not be in awe about the fact that they work at all, when Murphy’s law says that they simply shouldn’t possibly work.

For non-technologists, this is all a black box. That is a great success of technology: all those layers of complexity are entirely hidden and people can use them without even knowing that they exist at all. That is the reason why many people can find computers so frustrating to use: there are so many things that can possibly go wrong that some of them inevitably will, but the complexity goes so deep that it’s impossible for most users to be able to do anything about any error.

In recent years, despite my love of all shiny code-filled things, I’ve had a nagging worry about the largely uncritical process by which society adopts new technologies, and this has surfaced on the blog occasionally: I’ve wondered about media consumption, questioned smartphones’ effects on our mental faculties, and even stopped checking Facebook. A few years ago, a friend told me about a book by Albert Borgmann which apparently called into question the fundamental operating pattern of technology. I was intrigued, and not a bit offended by the very idea of this, so I ordered Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life ( TCCL). It was my first foray into the philosophy of technology, and it profoundly changed the way I think about technology and technological devices.

This change didn’t come easy; in fact, Borgmann’s rather short book took me over a year to read. Partly this is because Borgmann’s writing is dense (full of rich meaning, but hard to digest), and partly it’s because I subconsciously knew my position on technology and thereby my habitual actions were in danger of being threatened by a sea change. After finishing the book last Fall and wrestling with / processing Borgmann’s ideas, I resolved to read the book again, blogging each chapter as I go (both to clarify my own understanding and to help his ideas reach a wider audience). My goal will be to summarize Borgmann’s ideas and engage with them briefly (though this will look primarily like explicating them and defending them against putative objections, since I have been so swayed by his perspective). There are, I think, accessible popularizations of Borgmann’s ideas already available (of which I believe Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford to be one), but I hope my bringing attention to this relatively new field will be helpful nonetheless. For now, I will give a brief overview of the book, and hopefully tackle Chapter 1 sometime soon.

Book Overview

Borgmann’s book attempts to answer the basic question “What is technology?” by elucidating the basic character or pattern of technology (and indeed arguing that there is such a discernible pattern), and using that understanding to suggest a direction for the reform of technology (that such a reform is necessary is motivated by the nature of the basic pattern Borgmann argues has emerged).

There are, he claims, essentially three views on the essence of technology: the substantive, the instrumentalist, and the pluralist. On the substantive view, technology is a force in its own right, with its own character, and can thereby explain other phenomena in a properly basic way. For people who hold this view, technology is often pernicious, i.e., something to be avoided or minimized (cf. the anti-technology “Luddites”). On the instrumentalist view, technology is not a thing in and of itself, beyond the facts of machines and the purposes to which humans set them. Morality vis a vis technology is therefore the same as morality vis a vis anything else—technology has no distinctive character which warrants a different analysis. Technology is essentially composed of more and better tools: there is no qualitative difference on the philosophical level between an iPhone and a hammer and chisel. Finally, the pluralist view brings to the fore the complexity of the task of describing technology, and makes no statements about its essence: it recognizes the validity in both the substantive and instrumentalist perspectives and attempts no adjudication.

Borgmann is concerned in TCCL to argue for the substantive view, though in a patently non-Luddite tone. He rejects the pluralist view outright as a failure to recognize the reality that technology is something: pluralism is an unhelpful recapitulation of the problem of defining technology. The instrumentalist view is, according to Borgmann, the dominant and subconscious view, held by philosophers as well as popular culture (indeed, it was my view before reading his book), and much of the book is therefore spent explaining some of its inadequacies. His main critique is that the instrumentalist view fails to recognize the overarching paradigm which characterizes technology, and whose challenge cannot be met without engaging in so-called “deictic discourse” (essentially, discourse containing reference to ultimate goods). The whole point of instrumentalism is to avoid deictic discourse, and to assert that technology is a value-neutral enterprise, ready to be aimed towards the definition of good of whoever holds the trigger. Borgmann’s claim that in fact technology has its own “bent” brings up questions of social justice and social responsibility which end up being difficult to discuss profitably in the marketplace, especially when instrumentalism is assumed all around.

The pattern Borgmann sees underlying technology as a whole is called the “device paradigm”, defined as the making of goods available in a non-burdensome way, increasingly through the removal of the inner workings of the good-producing machine from human view and from human understanding. There is therefore a distinction between a thing and a device. Wood, for example, is a thing: it is felled, chopped, stacked, and put into a fire in order to burn and produce heat for a family. While fire itself is a scientific phenomenon difficult to explain, at no point is the production of heat (for the purpose of warmth) opaque to human participants. The wood also confronts us with its thingness: it is rough, heavy, requires work to chop, turns into annoying ash, has a distinct smell, produces smoke, etc… All of these things are intrinsic and cannot be separated from the heat produced.

A central heating system, on the other hand, produces warmth without any of these effects. The system itself is hidden from view (obviating the need for a hearth around which families gathered), and its workings are opaque to observers who are not specially trained in the technology. Warmth is commoditized and separated from its previously-physical concomitants. This is precisely what a device is: something that provides a commodity in a non-burdensome way, via the inner workings of black box of the machine.

According to Borgmann, the commoditization of certain goods which used to be obtainable only in conjunction with certain “focal practices” (practices central to the humanity of humans, or related to “ultimate” concerns) is dangerous on a number of levels, and becomes an issue of social responsibility and justice, precisely when the instrumental view of technology illegitimates talk of ultimate concerns in the first place. What Borgmann sees happening is the increasing procurement of goods without the contexts which originally gave those goods meaning. Microwave dinners, treadmills, and the assembly line all come into view as clear examples of devices which subtly undermine the value in (respectively) the process of preparing food, the engagement of the physical world via running through it, and the satisfaction of creative, skilled labor.

It should be clear at this point that Borgmann believes technology needs reform, and the last third of the book is devoted to this issue. I will stop the overview here, however, and wait to discuss his recommendations until more of the scene is set. Suffice it to say that reform for Borgmann involves a recognition of the importance of focal things and practices, an awareness of nature, and deeper reflection on excellence, happiness, work, and political involvement.

Book Outline

• Part One: The Problem of Technology

  • 1 Technology and Theory
  • 2 Theories of Technology
  • 3 The Choice of a Theory
  • 4 Scientific Theory
  • 5 Scientific Explanation
  • 6 The Scope of Scientific Explanation
  • 7 Science and Technology

• Part Two: The Character of Technology

  • 8 The Promise of Technology
  • 9 The Device Paradigm
  • 10 The Foreground of Technology
  • 11 Devices, Means, and Machines
  • 12 Paradigmatic Explanation
  • 13 Technology and the Social Order
  • 14 Technology and Democracy
  • 15 The Rule of Technology
  • 16 Political Engagement and Social Justice
  • 17 Work and Labor
  • 18 Leisure, Excellence, and Happiness
  • 19 The Stability of Technology

• Part Three: The Reform of Technology

  • 20 The Possibilities of Reform
  • 21 Deictic Discourse
  • 22 The Challenge of Nature
  • 23 Focal Things and Practices
  • 24 Wealth and the Good Life
  • 25 Political Affirmation
  • 26 The Recovery of the Promise of Technology

Interviewing Borgmann

After completing this series, I had the opportunity to interview Albert at his home in Montana. Our very enlightening conversation has been transcribed and written up here as 4 separate posts:

• Interviewing Borgmann, Part 1
• Interviewing Borgmann, Part 2
• Interviewing Borgmann, Part 3
• Interviewing Borgmann, Part 4

Science

• Honeybees are found to interact with quantum fields - a researcher noticed that bee dances trace a 2-dimensional projection of formulas of some kind of quantum math. Bee dances seemed pretty arbitrary before, and now this researcher claims that bees may be ‘in touch’ with quantum fields. If true, this would be interesting and awesome.
• Scientists find evidence that many universes exist - I’ve always thought that “many universes” is a contradiction in terms, but hey. It turns out that our particular ‘universe’ may be just one of many ‘cosmic bubbles’ colliding around in some vast ‘multiverse’. I don’t believe this yet, and won’t until people define their terms better.
• Thunderstorms generate anti-matter - powerful thunderstorms can generate crazy gamma ray bursts scientists think may be accompanied by anti-matter. That would be anti-awesome.

Philosophy

• Albert Einstein writes on science and religion - some good stuff in here, especially about the awe and surprise of finding that nature has rational foundations. Also other general philosophy of science points. I still disagree with his overall statement, which is that the historically-bound bits of religion should be discarded, since he appears to take for granted their fundamental falsity.
• Minimalism works - apparently, someone on the Internet made fun of minimalism. The article I linked is a rebuttal which I found concise and useful. Yay minimalism!

Culture

• Suburban sprawl sucks - and it’s bad for you too. I confess this was too long for me to read completely, but I did get that the author is an advocate of getting rid of zoning laws. I, too, advocate thus.
• The dangers of externalizing knowledge - this is a favorite topic of mine. What happens when we stop learning everything except how to Google? It’s possible that that is indeed the one skill which leads to success in life, and therefore will encourage social evolution to continue in the current trend. I’m just afraid that learning is a holistic process of shaping the entire person, body and soul. What happens when we postpone this shaping until we load Wikipedia? What will our unshaped minds do with that information, anyway? I could go on. Nice to see this on TechCrunch.
• Caring for your introvert - this guy makes some rather grand statements concerning introversion. Given that I’m an introvert, I’m inclined to agree with the whole ‘introverts are superior’ thing, except I know it’s false. Good article anyway, despite being overblown. I also think the Enneagram could account for a lot of what he is describing, without as much polarization (or arrogance, for that matter).

Theology

• Agnostic Christianity - doubt isn’t bad. In fact, it’s an unavoidable part of faith. Embrace and respect it!
• The Seven: not exactly deacons - what happens when the Apostles decide they’re too important to wait tables? God uses the waiters instead. Or something like that… some good potential pastor-skewering in these passages.

Food

• A coder’s guide to coffee - I am a coder and I love coffee. Therefore, I love this article. I just need to find a way to roast my own beans in Oxford…
• L-Theanine in tea and not coffee - apparently this amino acid enables our bodies to use caffeine in a much more zenly awesome way. Where is it naturally found? Not coffee (damn!) but tea. If I used coffee as a mind hack, maybe I’d switch to tea. Unfortunately, I drink coffee because (a) it tastes really good, and (b) I’m physically and psychologically addicted to it. Oh well.
• A hacker’s guide to tea - If I were to switch this is the guide that I’d use! One thing I particularly liked: camomille is not real tea! Ha, I always knew camomille sucked.

Random

• Trimensional - a 3d scanner for the iphone. I haven’t tried it, but… really cool idea! I’m also not sure what I’d do with a 3d model of my face. I’m also not sure why they used the guy they did for the screenshots. Yikes!
• How to draw an owl - Click through and see the picture. Hilarious. And also a good prompt for discussion. So often, what is left out of how-to guides is: “now, practice x for thousands of hours”.

This brief moral statement has captivated me, not only because it seems to make a lot of sense, but also because of how infrequently such a morality is even attempted to be lived out on a large scale. Regardless of how things have been throughout human history, there is still in our world a great deal of “conflict resolution” which is really one party using violence or the threat of violence to get their way. Is there a different way, a third way which avoids the problems with both violent conflict and pacifist inaction? More importantly, how could such a third way be effective against guns? Needless to say, these kinds of deliberations deserve book-length treatment, and I’ll probably be unable to think fully about such questions in blog entries, however often I might muse about them.

Anyway, my thoughts about non-violence also typically lead to thoughts about armies, and the US Armed Forces in particular, whose fundamental purpose seems to be to pursue the aims of the US through violence or the threat of violence. I know that the forces are trained to do more than kill, and often engage in humanitarian activities; those, however, are incidental to the actual purpose of the military (otherwise, why guns?). Thoughts like these were triggered again a few days ago, when I was sent this Veteran’s Day video, originally found on the NRA’s website. You might as well watch it, since it’s what this post is about:

I don’t know if anyone else had this reaction, but I found the video deeply ironic. The climax of the speech was a story about a soldier’s heroism which was designed to evoke pride in the soldier’s action and therefore pride in our country by his representation. It did this very well: to think that a Navy corpsman would rush into a firefight in order to rescue a wounded enemy is extremely moving, and I am awed at the courageous act. The irony, for me, was that the action so lauded of this marine by Oliver North was precisely the kind of action I don’t imagine is military protocol: an action of non-violent compassion in the face of a very real danger of violence. We rightly take pride in our association by nationality with a hero like the one in this story, but I wonder whether he was acting fully as a dispenser of his duties? Maybe, on the other hand, the mutual recognition of humanity in the enemy triggered this heroic rescue?

I’m sure I’m very ignorant of actual battle protocol in the army, and maybe there is a command to merely disable the enemy so that they can be rescued, given medical attention, and imprisoned or rehabilitated. Something tells me, however, that US generals would be pretty concerned if all of their soldiers were in the habit of risking their lives for wounded Iraqi insurgents. My point is that the story is so powerful it got told at an NRA annual meeting even when the power in the story comes from the fact that the corpsman didn’t use his weapon!

It got me thinking: what if there were a force of women and men trained in almost all the same ways as Marines, such that they were physically and mentally prepared to run into dangerous situations to rescue others, but who were unwilling to do violence to anyone they encountered? Reason says they’d all get slaughtered, but… it’s also a really interesting thought.

So much of what the NRA video did was to evoke pride and respect at the various skills and disciplines involved in being a soldier: taking care of oneself, cleaning one’s gun, walking all day in 120-degree heat without complaint, sharing the last vestiges of life with a dying comrade, and so on. We are naturally drawn to glorify such skill and sacrifice, and I admit it is impressive. However, when is it appropriate to stop asking what the skill is used for?

Stories draw upon this natural awe at great skill all the time, and so we can root for the team of skillful thieves even though what they are doing is illegal, and if their theft was directed at us we would prosecute them. Likewise, it is easy to glorify the warrior because the warrior is talented, skillful, and disciplined. The process of becoming a warrior teaches valuable personal skills, delivers confidence, etc… But does our adulation of the skillfulness involved in battle cloud over the fact that what we are adulating, at the end of the day, is battle, i.e., people killing each other? Killing isn’t what the average soldier does on any given day, but let’s face it: what country on earth trains their army in every skill except for shooting people?

Essentially, what I’m saying is that the fact that somebody is well-trained at something doesn’t make that thing good! We might have well-trained rapists and murderers walking around, but that doesn’t making them any more honorable or less deserving of incarceration. I hasten to add that I don’t equate soldiers with criminals! What they do is legitimated by every nation in the history of our species, and at the end of the day perhaps necessary to procure a slightly greater amount of peace, or stop evil from taking over the entire earth. I’m not convinced of that, though admittedly I don’t know very much yet. I’m also not convinced that, even if that necessity has held in the past, it has to hold in the future. I believe that however necessary we think war is, we should always be deeply saddened by it and ashamed of it as a human race.

Another curious point from the NRA video is the connection North makes between warfare and faith. I’m not sure what he meant, but it sounded like he said most soldiers are in the armed forces because of faith. Is that faith in freedom, or religious faith? If it’s religious faith (and North only showed examples of Christians), I’m even more concerned: as I look at Jesus, I don’t see a whole lot to commend violence, whether as a first or last resort. Moreover, the connection between praying before battle and praying before football highlights another worry: in either case, do you think God wants one team to lose, one to win?

One parting quote from the Ring of Freedom website:

Think of the fearless men and women who put on a uniform every day to make freedom possible—because there are no freedoms, without those willing to fight for them.

This is one of the stickiest points of this whole business: isn’t freedom worth dying to protect? Isn’t it worth killing to protect? Isn’t self-determination so basic a human right we’re justified in exterminating those who hinder others from experiencing it? I just don’t know; killing someone sure seems like a good way to end their experiment in self-determination! The Marine who rescued the Iraqi soldier, on the other hand, gave him that, and more: the knowledge that an enemy from the other side of the planet cared enough about his humanity to risk his life making sure it didn’t end. Now that is inspiring!

PS: I think it goes without saying that I greatly respect the sacrifices of those who have selflessly given their lives for causes greater than themselves. I respect that the average soldier has nothing to do with the motivations which lead her country into war, and whether they approximate those of a ‘just’ war. And I respect that the cycle of violence thrusts violence upon citizens of the world when they do not deserve it. However, I do believe that cycle needs to be examined, and that sacrifice must be respected with a conscious understanding of the goal of that sacrifice! Lastly, I am acutely aware that, whatever the morality of the wars that secured my freedom, I do make use of a freedom which was gained by someone fighting for it, and I am indeed thankful for that freedom. I simply hope that we can find a better way to procure it! And that won’t happen if we assume what we currently have is good enough.

Last week, I saw The Dark Knight. It was incredible, easily the best movie I’ve seen in the last year and probably in my Top 10 overall. It had a wonderful balance of action, good writing, amazing acting, thoughtful plot, and provocative questions. The questions it raises (and answers?) are, as you would expect from a good Batman movie, all about justice and violence and how much of the latter is permitted in search of the former.

A few months ago, that would have been all I perceived in the film. Recently, however, I’ve been going through René Girard’s I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, since I’d wanted to get a taste of his thought through one of his books rather than from a secondary source like Walter Wink. Anyway, I was nearly done with the book when I saw The Dark Knight, and was surprised when I saw the film explode with new meaning for me, unlocked by Girard’s concepts! I thought a brief exposition of the connections could be illuminating (and maybe inspire someone to read Girard, whom I now believe to be one of the most important thinkers of our time).

Attempting a one-paragraph introduction to Girard’s theses is silly, but here we go: his main idea is that there is a hidden principle that ties together all of human society, which stems from the fact that as creatures we are prone to mimetic desire, that is, we are prone to mimicking others’ desires, or desiring what others have. This naturally creates ever-building conflicts (which he calls scandals), and these scandals mount and mount until a moment when there is so much intrasocietal tension that people come to the verge of the “war of all-against-all”, since the only logical conclusion of “mimetic rivalry” is murder. In order to prevent such a catastrophic degradation into pure bestiality and to restore order, Girard thinks these tensions and energies are collectively focused in a spontaneous and unanimous redirection to a swift and violent “war of all-against-one”. This “one” is referred to as the scapegoat, initially demonized then subsequently divinized for his “ability” (through sacrifice) to bring calm to the community. This whole process, Girard says, is ritualized and then mythologized in such a way that the actual violent mechanism (the “single victim mechanism”) is veiled and invisible to the contemporary participants then the later receivers of the mythological tradition. In other words, the citizens who pick up the stones actually believe that the one they are about to murder, even though a moment ago he was one of the crowd, is now worthy of death.

Girard goes on to base some astonishingly profound claims on top of this foundation, which are worth exploring further if you have the time to read his work. He also supports his powerful anthropological claim in a way that I clearly don’t have the space to outline here - it truly is amazing when he examines the myths of the ancient world and compares them to the stories from the Judeo-Christian tradition (which he thinks is the only tradition to see and expose the single victim mechanism for what it is - a second-rate and temporary solution to the main problem of human existence). Of particular interest for Christians, he unlocks a new and compelling way of reading Jesus’ words and the history of early Christianity radically nonviolently, particularly the Crucifixion. (Girard loves treating Jesus’ willing death, not so much a “blood sacrifice” in the sense as all the other ritual sacrifices which mask the single victim mechanism, but as an action that looks enough like it to dupe the “principalities and powers” into triggering the mechanism, only for it to backfire via the Resurrection and Jesus’ powerful exposition of their hidden secret for maintaining power). Finally, Girard thinks that in our modern society, thanks to the insights of Christianity, we tend to be characterized by “concern for victims” rather than a subconscious willingness to sacrifice them.

Obviously, a lot more could be said, but sooner or later we have to get to The Dark Knight. In the movie, Batman is wrestling with some essentially Girardian questions (common to superheroes, it seems). He sees the fundamental problem of society (Gotham) clearly - disorder, violence, and inaction, and attempts to counter these problems with his own brand of nonlethal (rather than lethal or nonviolent) crime-fighting. He soon discovers, unfortunately, that his actions only heighten the tension and spawn nemeses of greater caliber. This corresponds, I’d say, to Girard’s description of the multiplication of scandals and the move to a breaking point.

The breaking point comes in the form of the Joker, a mysterious individual who describes himself primarily as an agent of chaos, which is extremely interesting in a Girardian sense given that “chaos” is exactly what the single victim mechanism evolved to counter - so already we can imagine that perhaps one of the Joker’s roles in the film will be to instigate this societal mechanism. In fact, he does this on a number of occasions! His favorite games all seem to involve forcing supposedly-upright citizens into situations where it looks like sacrificing one (or a few) of their number will bring calm and restore order (the call to murder the Wayne Enterprises employee about to reveal the identity of Batman, the ferry dilemma, his speech to Harvey Dent, etc…). In other words, he is inviting the triggering of the single victim mechanism, even explicitly, as a way for Gotham to regain peace. But tellingly, this “peace” is only temporary - the next day, the Joker will be back with another escalation of tension and another demand. This is exactly how Girard describes the single victim mechanism - a violent and temporary reduction of societal tension.

It’s also interesting to examine the Joker in the light of Girard’s thoughts about Satan as the principle (rather than the “person” - Girard doesn’t want to award Satan with real existence-in-himself) behind mimetic violence (the violence generated by mimetic desire and resulting in the single victim mechanism). Girard sees Satan as maintaining power precisely through the operation of this mechanism (as the Joker does).

Another of the themes in the movie is Batman’s wrestling with the Joker’s argument that they are basically the same. Nemeses, true, but both costume-wearing crazies: one out to promote order and the other to destroy it. It seems that the Joker’s argument is really intended as a temptation for Batman to give in and use the same tools as his enemy (using lethal rather than nonlethal force). Girard’s theory speaks to this situation as well, when he talks about “mimetic rivalry”. Two people who desire the same thing eventually become hard-and-fast rivals - that much is pretty obvious. But he also explains that two rivals, supposedly different in every sense, through their intense rivalry generate a fundamental likeness as they are consumed by their rage against each other and eventually become beings with one main characteristic: the desire to defeat the other. And so the Joker invites Batman to succumb to this cycle, to descend into the facelessness of mimetic rivalry where the combatants have more in common with each other (via their combat) than not.

In all of this, Batman has to make decisions about whether to play the game offered by the Joker (and indeed, it seems the only option), or whether to reject the Joker’s starting assumptions. These questions are put not just to him, but to all the people of Gotham, especially in the ferry trial. The options: order at the cost of other people’s lives, or pure chaos (everybody dies). It seems sadly obvious to us, the viewers, that the former option is better than the latter. But Batman (and the people on the boats) decide to believe in a third option - the path of nonviolence and the willingness to be sacrificed. Of course, that path doesn’t always lead to a happy ending - though it did in the movie because of Batman’s skill in trapping the Joker.

But how does that help us? What if we were in the same situation, except without a Batman to perform our miracles? This is where faith in God is put to the test (or rather, where faith in God puts him to the test), and we find out what Jesus (and so many other innocent victims) felt like before being torn apart by the mob… But perhaps I should leave that an open question!

Well, I hope I’ve made it clear that there are some cool resonances between The Dark Knight and Girard’s theories. I haven’t done any research or exploration to see if the writers / director of the movie have read Girard or intentionally used any of his ideas in making the movie. Either way, The Dark Knight stands as a powerful representation of these important themes, and asks us to confront within ourselves questions about violence, scapegoating, and sacrifice.

I didn’t get an iPhone then because of my imminent move to Kenya (where it would have been a bad idea to flash one of those around, even if it functioned), but with the recent emergence of the iPhone 3G, I decided to take the plunge, and see if this device was as life-changing as it was cracked up to be. Turns out, it is! But I’m beginning to wonder at what cost.

It’s no secret that technology changes us. A few years ago I reflected on the iPod’s effects on culture, and earlier this month, Melissa raised similar questions, with respect to Google. I had an interesting experience today, however, which proved that these changes can insinuate themselves into deep parts of our cognition.

I was walking down the street with some friends, looking for Los Hermanos, a great burrito place. I was in the general vicinity of it, I thought, but wasn’t quite sure of the cross street, and I was confused that I hadn’t seen the restaurant thus far on my walk. Well, I said to myself - that’s what I have an iPhone for! So I fired it up, Googled the restaurant, and had a street address in under a minute. 2026 Chestnut. “OK, what’s the address of this store here? 2016… OK, that means that Los Hermanos should be…” At which point, I looked up from my phone and noticed the large, brightly-colored sign hanging above the business not more than 15 feet from where I was standing. Yep, it was Los Hermanos.

It was very interesting to me that my first instinct, upon finding myself in a place where I expected to see one thing and saw another, thereby needing more locational information, was to use the Internet rather than my eyes. My eyes, having evolved to perform precisely the task I needed done (namely the gaining of local spatial knowledge) were passed over in favor of technology. Which meant, of course, that the more dangerous trade - my memory for Google - was implicit.

But why not trust to the skills that were bestowed upon us via our natural adaptations? Have we truly passed into an age where our environments are changing far more rapidly than our bodies can adapt? It certainly seems like it. But perhaps the more interesting question is, what will that do to our bodies? When we learned how to cook food our jaws decreased in size. When we learned how to wear clothes, we lost our hair (depending on your view of this adaptation). When we learned how to live in cities, we lost our natural keen sensitivities to natural phenomena. When we learned how to use dead plant matter to propel ourselves in metal canisters across the earth, many of us lost the proper functioning of our legs and other muscles. When we taught ourselves that interesting content can be delivered in the time span of a short video clip or a 3-minute radio single, we infected ourselves with A.D.D. while simultaneously dulling our senses to anything not flashing or brightly-colored.

… And I could go on.

So, what will happen when we learn how to never need to remember anything again? What will that do to our brains? What will it do to our ability to survive without our newfangled devices? (Imagine trying to survive these days without clothes, fire or tools!) What species will we become, with essential parts of our existence scattered around the world in metal boxes on fragile hard drives? No longer homo sapiens, the thinking human, but homo technologicus, the equipped human. And so we have to ask ourselves, do we want to evolve in this way? The benefits of ubiquitous and distributed memory are immense, but what are the costs? What will happen to our ability to spend time in Nature qua natural beings, qua creatures?

Maybe that’s what we should be thinking about when buying our new iPhones (and yes, mine is very shiny) - but either way, it’s certainly not what is being advertised.