Reconstituting The Conditions Of Human Existence
"Mere" technological entities shape social and moral life
Thank you for being here. As always, these essays are free and publicly available without a paywall. If my writing is valuable to you, please share it with a friend or support me with a paid subscription.
If the experience of modern society shows us anything, however, it is that technologies are not merely aids to human activity, but also powerful forces acting to reshape that activity and its meaning. The introduction of a robot to an industrial workplace not only increases productivity, but often radically changes the process of production, redefining what "work" means in that setting. When a sophisticated new technique or instrument is adopted in medical practice, it transforms not only what doctors do, but also the ways people think about health, sickness, and medical care. Widespread alterations of this kind in techniques of communication, transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, and the like are largely what distinguishes our times from early periods of human history. The kinds of things we are apt to see as "mere" technological entities become much more interesting and problematic if we begin to observe how broadly they are involved in conditions of social and moral life.
Langdon Winner, "Technologies as Forms of Life" p. 6
As I watch the latest technological revolution of generative AI remake the world, I continue to find solace, wisdom, and inspiration in the voices of philosophers of technology. Over the past few years, I've written about many of them as I discover them. Some of the thinkers who have taken seats at the table of my mind include Ursula Franklin, Jacques Ellul, Neil Postman, and Albert Borgmann, among others. To say that these folks are not widely read or considered by those trained in the STEM fields is an understatement. I'm on a mission to change that, starting within my small sphere of influence at Harvey Mudd and with all of you here.
The value of critique
Surely there is a good reason that these folks are rarely engaged with in the context of STEM training, right? At first glance, it seems there is. They are, after all, anti-technology, right? If true, this would help to explain their absence from the standard STEM curriculum.
While it may be easy to take this surface-level view and dismiss them, what they offer us in their critique is a gift. If we've learned anything as we look back on even the past twenty years, it should be that technology, for all that it enables, is accompanied by a number of constraining forces as well. While the things that technology enables (what philosophers of technology call affordances) are almost always highlighted, the practices, habits, and activities that technology limits or eliminates are often left to be discovered only after it is too late. These deformational aspects don’t make it into the commercials and billboards. It is not hard to see the way that this one-sided view of technology has already done deep damage to the world as we know it. Staring down the barrel of the next major technological revolution of generative AI, the stakes are as high as they've been in our lifetime.
To be sure, generative AI has the potential to be a great enabler. But while the promises of increased efficiency and decreased toil are making headlines, there is a sinister undercurrent of the broader downstream effects that we are ignoring. We would be foolish to think that AI will not broadly influence the "conditions of social and moral life" as Winner calls them.
Many of these thinkers are quickly dismissed by misunderstanding the role of a critic. To be sure, critics produce criticism, and their critiques often point out the faults and neglected aspects of their subjects. But before we dismiss their work because they make uncomfortable assertions about technology and what it’s doing to us, perhaps we should consider what elements of truth they might be alerting us to. Even if we choose to proceed along the same trajectory we were on, perhaps these thinkers might offer some wisdom and insightful questions for us to take along the way.
On the whole, I find our modern technological world to be a largely positive development. The world we have created is as abundant in material resources like food, energy, and shelter as it has ever been in human history. I imagine that many of these writers would agree with that quantitative assessment. And yet, material resources are only one part of the equation. A comprehensive picture of progress requires not only a quantitative analysis but also a qualitative one. The numbers tell one story, but is the new world of abundance that we experience and hope for truly a fuller and more flourishing world? To answer this question, we must articulate a picture of what the world (and the creatures within it) are for. It is a question not only of simple ease of existence, but of purpose.
Material conditions are only part of the answer to this question. Our mortal bodies matter. The natural world matters. But the dimensions of a flourishing life go far beyond the material. They are physical, but they are also spiritual and ineffable, a reflection that the nature of reality goes beyond us and whatever parts of it we may be able to grasp.
Today, I want to return to one of the first voices that introduced me to this space: Langdon Winner. Winner, well known for his work as a political theorist with a particular interest in the role that technology plays in shaping our world, is a good gateway to this conversation. And unlike some others in this space (I’m looking at you Heidegger), his writing is broadly accessible. A good place to start is in the introductory chapter of his book The Whale and the Reactor, where he clearly and convincingly illustrates the way that technology is not simply something that we use, but something that transforms our everyday life.
Here is one parable about the way that technology shapes our world: the story of two neighbors, one traveling on foot and the other in a car.
Picture two men traveling in the same direction along a street on a peaceful, sunny day, one of them afoot and the other driving an automobile. The pedestrian has a certain flexibility of movement: he can pause to look in a shop window, speak to passersby, and reach out to pick a flower from a sidewalk garden. The driver, although he has the potential to move much faster, is constrained by the enclosed space of the automobile, the physical dimensions of the highway, and the rules of the road. His realm is spatially structured by his intended destination, by a periphery of more-or-less irrelevant objects (scenes for occasional side glances), and by more important objects of various kinds—moving and parked cars, bicycles, pedestrians, street signs, etc., that stand in his way. Since the first rule of good driving is to avoid hitting things, the immediate environment of the motorist becomes a field of obstacles.
Imagine a situation in which the two persons are next-door neighbors. The man in the automobile observes his friend strolling along the street and wishes to say hello. He slows down, honks his horn, rolls down the window, sticks out his head, and shouts across the street. More likely than not the pedestrian will be startled or annoyed by the sound of the horn. He looks around to see what’s the matter and tries to recognize who can be yelling at him across the way. “Can you come to dinner Saturday night?” the driver calls out over the street noise. “What?” the pedestrian replies, straining to understand. At that moment another car to the rear begins honking to break up the temporary traffic jam. Unable to say anything more, the driver moves on.
What we see here is an automobile collision of sorts, although not one that causes bodily injury. It is a collision between the world of the driver and that of the pedestrian. The attempt to extend a greeting and invitation, ordinarily a simple gesture, is complicated by the presence of a technological device and its standard operating conditions. The communication between the two men is shaped by an incompatibility of the form of locomotion known as walking and a much newer one, automobile driving.
Perhaps you can imagine what Winner, writing here in 1986, might say about the invention of the smartphone, social media, or—heaven forbid—the Apple Vision Pro or Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses. Collisions abound.
The world we face and will face over the next several years is one in which the situation Winner describes of the driver and his pedestrian neighbor seems almost idyllic. Oh, how we might yearn for the days when the only obstruction to our life together was street noise?
Every affordance that technology offers us—the ease of communication through messaging or calling, for example—comes with a limitation lurking in the shadows. And much like the street noise between neighbors, we probably take it simply with a shrug as "the way things are."
What voices like Winner et al. offer us is the opportunity to see the bigger picture of the society-shaping power of technology more clearly. The plea, from McLuhan to Berry to Ellul to Franklin, is that we would be willing to contemplate what is happening. This is a critical step in moving into the future with wisdom. As we continue to hear that the march toward progress is inevitable, Marshall McLuhan reminds us, "There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening."
But much like Winner's driver, I fear that we'll try, find the street noise to be too loud, and decide to go along on our merry way, never the wiser. If we are to wake up, we’ll need to focus our analysis on the big picture. It’s not what the technology is, how it’s made or used, or the systems and policies that govern it that matter most. What we need to pay attention to is the role that technical devices play in mediating our interaction with the world around us. Winner again:
Knowing how automobiles are made, how they operate, and how they are used and knowing about traffic laws and urban transportation policies does little to help us understand how automobiles affect the texture of modern life. In such cases a strictly instrumental/functional understanding fails us badly. What is needed is an interpretation of the ways, both obvious and subtle, in which everyday life is transformed by the mediating role of technical devices. In hindsight the situation is clear to everyone. Individual habits, perceptions, concepts of self, ideas of space and time, social relationships, and moral and political boundaries have all been powerfully restructured in the course of modern technological development. What is fascinating about this process is that societies involved in it have quickly altered some of the fundamental terms of human life without appearing to do so. Vast transformations in the structure of our common world have been undertaken with little attention to what those alterations mean. Judgments about technology have been made on narrow grounds, paying attention to such matters as whether a new device serves a particular need, performs more efficiently than its predecessor, makes a profit, or provides a convenient service. Only later does the broader significance of the choice become clear, typically as a series of surprising “side effects” or “secondary consequences.” But it seems characteristic of our culture’s involvement with technology that we are seldom inclined to examine, discuss, or judge pending innovations with broad, keen awareness of what those changes mean. In the technical realm we repeatedly enter into a series of social contracts, the terms of which are revealed only after the signing.
Winner "Technologies as Forms of Life" p. 9
There are countless voices pointing us toward the right questions to be asking about technology and its culture-shaping power. But the only question that really matters is this: Will we take the time to stop and ponder them?
If not, we’ll wake up only to find, as Winner puts it, that we’ve been “sleepwalking as the conditions of human existence have been entirely reconstituted.”
Got a thought? Leave a comment below.
Reading Recommendations
shared some thoughts from her commencement speech at Harvey Mudd over on her Substack and in a TIME magazine piece this week. In a world where commencement speeches are often predictable, we should celebrate the boldness to go out on a limb and speak boldly, even if we know that it will make waves. puts words to a feeling that many of us have likely been sensing for some time: the one thing that truly sets OpenAI apart above even any of their technical achievements is their comms.reflects on the influence of technology in general and AI in particular that has increasingly become a focus of his writing.OpenAI runs an incredibly effective comms operation. They are engaged in a communications campaign. And the purpose of the campaign is that whenever it starts to feel like progress in AI is slowing down, there needs to be another announcement or product demo that makes it feel like the future is fast-arriving.
has posted a few very thoughtful essays about AI lately. The latest is fittingly illustrated with an image of an ouroboros.Because of the dehumanizing forces of consumerism, bureaucracy, technology (A.I. in particular), addictions, secularism, and individualism, we have become alienated from the practices and habits of being human. This alienation is most commonly treated with more of the same poison that causes the alienation (e.g. A.I. chatbots to cure loneliness). To resist this decay of our humanity means (1) relearning the basics of life and (2) choosing not to do all that we can do (my favorite Ellul paraphrase). The goal of relearning the basics of life is to live into the creational reality of who God designed us to be, rather than defining our own telos (primarily through consumerism).
What I’m afraid of is that as future generations of AI train themselves on the hallucinations and confabulations of AI slop, they’re going to encode that slop into the source material, something that earlier digital discovery tools didn’t do. We’re not that far from it being perfectly plausible for an AI that is asked to find Andy Weir’s non-existent novel The Last Algorithm to elect to actually generate a plausible version of that novel based on the fake description that has now been quoted in hundreds of newspapers and social media posts. (The fake description is almost creepily appropriate to exactly that prospect—it feels like a version of “The Purloined Letter” for an AI to have generated that description.)
The Book Nook
Don’t sleep on a subtitle. In The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology, Langdon Winner helps us understand not only the world we have created, but the one we hope to create. A worthwhile (and enjoyable) read not only for historical perspective, but as we look and build toward the future.
The Professor Is In
The professor is out. As of 1:30 am last Thursday morning, a comfortable ten and a half hours before final grades were due later that day at noon, I finished grading and submitting my grades for the semester.
Earlier in the week, I began my summer research program with seven talented Mudders in which will run for the next ten weeks, but sabbatical has, for nearly all intents and purposes, arrived. I’ll share more in the coming weeks about what I’ll be up to, but the short version is that I’ll be spending most of the next year with my friends at Praxis.
Leisure Line
If you’re going to make a coffee cake, make this one. It’s delicious and comes highly recommended by all the children (and adults) in the Brake household.
Still Life
Despite a visit from the local bee lady that our landlord brought in over the weekend to relocate the hive that had taken up residence in our wall, the bees are decidedly still present and seemingly (reasonably?) befuddled at the prospect of being locked out. The saga continues…
"What is needed is an interpretation of the ways, both obvious and subtle, in which everyday life is transformed by the mediating role of technical devices. In hindsight the situation is clear to everyone. Individual habits, perceptions, concepts of self, ideas of space and time, social relationships, and moral and political boundaries have all been powerfully restructured in the course of modern technological development."
A big problem here is that we only see the emergent social outcomes after-the-fact, generally after they've become deeply embedded in society. At that point, trying to push back or otherwise reclaim what has been lost is incredibly difficult.
Reading Ed Zitron pointing out that, in fact, generative AI stuff is almost completely devoid of real killer uses cases and has the paltry revenues to show for it has been a balm- as he points out, there are literally slot machines with better ROI, and the asks the big players are making to get to the next notch (the one they promise will be the actually interesting one) might in fact be materially impossible.. There just aren't that many instances where churning factually iffy text at scale without reference to what's in a person's head is useful- it's a list that seems to consist of spammers and spammy marketers, students shooting themselves in the foot, and bored people seeing what it can do.
I say this because I think the fight might be less a search within ourselves for the sorts of lives we want to live, and more about expressing our real and firm preferences together- to swat away the big piles of money that are insisting, evidence to the contrary and in big repeats of cryptocurrency and Web3 and the metaverse and everything else that this is the future. The reason these companies are insisting so keenly that these developments are inevitable is because they are in fact deeply precarious.