“La culture se conduit envers l’objet technique comme l’homme envers l’étranger quand il se laisse emporter par la xénophobie primitive.”, MEOT

A friend of mine is contributing to a paper involving Gilbert Simondon and we discussed some of his ideas, which I think could be really useful in the next years. Titled “On the mode of existence of technical objects”, he published his doctoral thesis in 1958 and kept on writing among other things about technological progress, the technical object and how they are placed in society. In simple words, he argues for placing education about the technical object on the same level as education in mathematics, natural sciences and culture. Because we are surrounded by technical objects we know nothing about the way they function, we feel alienated and reject technology as evil, he postulates. Therefor, we should educate ourselves on the tools we built and are surrounded by. If you only read the intro, which I can recommend, you’ll find he shows a well-balanced attitude towards technology and society, while ridiculing technologists who see technical objects as providing every solution (much like Morozov’s “solutionism”). “The contrast between culture and technics, between man and machine is wrong and pointless”, he writes, a fake tension hiding behind fake humanism. The machine is a stranger, because we don’t know anything about it. Which he wants to change.

This all feels very familiar to me. We really are submerged by technical objects. The technical objects of yesterday, of which Simondon writes, have been augmented by today’s technical objects, and we now have an additional layer of extremely specialized technology around us, on top of a layer we still can’t really explain, black boxes inside black boxes. So clearly, it gets easier to mislead the consumer (or the citizen for that matter), both on benefits, side and harmful effects. As the complexity of our tools increases, so do the dimensions of ignorance. We are after all living in a highly specialized society, and we don’t have the time to keep up. But, like Simondon wrote, with every dimension we ignore, we potentially feel a little more alienated. The mechanical phone wasn’t too scary. But soon, you could take it with you and the landlines dispersed into the ether. Then, it could understand text, and some years later, it showed you images. Now, it suddenly hears you, and knows where your things are, and your friends, and how you feel this morning, and soon it will render your augmented field of view, which you will gladly accept as a better version of your current less informative, less playful field of view. Somehow, your phone is and will be your line to the cloud, where it will help you control your car, or someone else’s. You will also have a detailed look on the soil and the leaves of your greens which are sitting in your kitchen, stored somewhere in the cloud. All this will be available to you. Actually, you will have offloaded so many things to the cloud that it is unclear where your phone stops and your virtualized part of the cloud will start. Actually, that phrase is misleading because it won’t be you, technically. It will be some part of one of your technical objects. And you won’t really know what it stored there, and to whom it will be accessible, neither how often, nor to what price. Your phone functions on a need-to-know basis. And you don’t need to know. For the most part.

As said, Simondon published this in 1958, a year after John von Neumann died, before being able to finish his Silliman lectures. The technical object back then included computers, but only recently did they have stored memory programs, which means that the hardware couldn’t change the orders it was given by paper strips, so to speak. So it still was more about hardware than software. The technical object mainly was the first layer. The electrical component, the jet engine, or the television. It wasn’t about large-scale interconnection and massive sharing of information. Software, or programs, only started to become a thing. And what’s more, the technical object didn’t know anything about you, because it didn’t store anything about you. As far as I know, the market we call data economy today was a very different thing.

It would be interesting to know what Simondon would think about our current way of life. In part because I think that education about our contemporary technical objects needs to be seconded by education about the data economy. Knowledge about this market is sparse and for big actors, it is what fuels their product, it structures their intentions. Yet we don’t know much about this market as a consumer. The selling and buying of data products is not only what fuels the ad industry, but is also what enables deep learning (or erects market barriers). Since we are still some time away from general intelligence, all our deep learning tools remain tools, even if they are highly complex. They’re still based on somebody’s intention, they’re still a technical object to us. Like a really, really effective hammer. Yet, we feel as though they arrive from another star, given to us by some foreign entity. With tools in our hands capable of such complexity, it’s easy to think they really have an intelligence, character or intention of their own. This will become more difficult by the month and by the headline. To make this easier, we should educate not only the potential coder, but also the potential consumer or citizen.