Notices by Howard Rheingold (hrheingold@mastodon.social)

I'm interested in critical conversations about #technology. I'm a technology enthusiast. I'm grateful for chemotherapy and html and enthusiastic about #onlinecommunities -- but also have always tried to think about how and why our tool use can change us and our environment in undesirable ways. A thread:

Off the top of my head, four different concepts/metaphors have proved to be useful.

Lewis Mumford's "megamachine" -- the notion that the ur-technology that drove its evolution was the way rulers and their muscle allied with priests to build pyramids and irrigation projects by treating people as components in a hierarchical machine with overseers at every level.

Heidegger is mostly impenetrable to me, but I latched onto his notion of a "standing reserve." Humans make use of the world, (...more)

we turn stones into axes and came to see the world as a "standing reserve" for our exploitation.

Jacques Ellul wrote presciently and somewhat depressingly about the future of technology back in the 1950s. In English, his masterwork is "The Technological Society." In the original French, it's "La Technique." Technique, or any method for achieving ends with increasing efficiency, is the foundation -- like standing reserve, it's a way of seeing the world. Technology grows from it. (more)

Finally , Langdon Winner taught me about "regimes." The greater part of technology is not visible. An automobile is the result of a complex global supply chain, from mines to microchips, and its use of petroleum is changing the climate.

So...what other concepts/metaphors have proved to be useful to you for thinking about #technology