[HN Gopher] Greeks Bearing Gifts: tracking the labyrinthine path...
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Greeks Bearing Gifts: tracking the labyrinthine path of
technology's progress
Author : Hooke
Score : 39 points
Date : 2021-04-08 05:12 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.laphamsquarterly.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.laphamsquarterly.org)
| wcr3 wrote:
| complete waste of time.
| rektide wrote:
| yes indeed it's other people's devices, gifts from afar, we
| welcome in now. not our progress. not our technology. just gifts.
| rektide wrote:
| The title "Greeks Bearing Gifts: trakcing the labyrinthine path
| of technology's progress" goes fairly unremarked in the article,
| but it left a big impression on me, was something I expected this
| article to encompass, since it touches less on technology as a
| stand-alone thing unto itself, and more of how technology is
| wielded & for whom.
|
| From Steve Talbott's Devices of the Soul[1],
|
| _" Now, jumping ahead to our own day, I'd like you to think for
| a moment of the various words we use to designate technological
| products. You will notice that a number of these words have a
| curious double aspect: they, or their cognate forms, can refer
| either to external objects we make, or to certain inner
| activities of the maker. A "device," for example, can be an
| objective, invented thing, but it can also be some sort of
| scheming or contriving of the mind, as when a defendant uses
| every device he can think of to escape the charges against him.
| The word "contrivance" shows the same two-sidedness, embracing
| both mechanical appliances and the carefully devised plans and
| schemes we concoct in thought. As for "mechanisms" and
| "machines," we produce them as visible objects out there in the
| world even as we conceal our own machinations within ourselves.
| Likewise, an "artifice" is a manufactured device, or else it is
| trickery, ingenuity, or inventiveness. "Craft" can refer to
| manual dexterity in making things and to a ship or aircraft, but
| a "crafty" person is adept at deceiving others.
|
| This odd association between technology and deceit occurs not
| only in our own language, but even more so in Homer's Greek,
| where it is much harder to separate the inner and outer meanings,
| and the deceit often reads like an admired virtue. The Greek
| techne, from which our own word "technology" derives, meant
| "craft, skill, cunning, art, or device"--all referring without
| discrimination to what we would call either an objective
| construction or a subjective capacity or maneuver. Techne was
| what enabled the lame craftsman god, Hephaestus, to trap his
| wife, Aphrodite, in a promiscuous alliance with warlike Ares. "_
|
| It's powerful groundings, and all too often I wonder & I fret
| about where we stand: how understandable is our technology? How
| much technology exists that spreads the memetics, the idea of
| it's means, that illuminates the world? Trying to understand
| technology feels like being lost in the labyrinth, I fret.
|
| At this point, Ursala Franklin's Holistic and Prescriptive
| technologies wikipedia link[2] is on my browsers hotlist, it
| knows real quick where I'm headed, cause I go here a lot.
| Prescriptive technology is designed to enact control, to perform
| functions: it's about a mechanism that does the task, does the
| job. It's the pulley block factory production line mentioned in
| the article. And modern technology, even social ones, resembles
| this: use technology to gather posts/pictures/content from all
| over, bring them together into big data centers, then send that
| data back out. This is technology as mechanism, a device.
|
| Ursala also describes holistic technologies. These are more the
| tools Marc Brunel and Henry Maudslay used to create this
| production line, the tools they used to devise their factory.
| Holistic technologies don't necessarily have to enlighten &
| illuminate their users, but they do have to empower them, give
| the user flexibility.
|
| I have great hopes that computing is a place where we can extend
| the holistic nature of technology. Where technology is less about
| deviousness of bending materials & systems &, in communicative
| capitalism, people, in to a specific form, and more about
| expanding generally prowess & capability of the weilders. And
| letting users participate in expanding & augmenting the tooling,
| letting the user become a tool maker. But, as the article does
| somewhat mysteriously abruptly shift & wrap up to,
|
| _" As Daniel Susskind so dismayingly notes, our computational
| muscle has now reached a point where we can create machines--
| devices variously mechanical, electronic, or atomic--that can
| think for themselves. And outthink us, to boot.
|
| [...] and though not all is lost to science since in certain
| places our ability to perform archaic crafts remains intact,
| still there is an ominous note sounding not too far offstage."_
|
| [1] https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/devices-of-
| the/97805965...
|
| [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin#Holistic_and_p...
| mikewarot wrote:
| The essential unwritten corollary to this article is the
| intensely underappreciated importance of understanding exactly
| how technology works.
|
| Knowledge _is_ power, and far too many people have zero interest
| in how things actually work. I 'm allergic to such ignorance, if
| I can find out how something works, generally it is pleasing for
| me to do so. I suspect this trait is shared universally by those
| here on HN.
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