Value Beyond Instrumentalization
A few friends and I published a collection of letters.
Short note today (I’m still trying to figure out how best to use this Substack versus my personal website) to say that I just published one of my longer pieces in a while. It’s type-set prettily here.
It was so meaningful to work together with a group of people I admired on topics I think are deeply important; I’d like to do more of this sort of work, and will be announcing the inaugural issue of a new magazine about technology in a month that I’m also deeply excited about.
If the letter prompts anything for you, I’d love to hear about it, especially if you come from a different disciplinary or professional background!
Excited to finally share some collaborative writing work done w/ @joininteract's support over the last year, together with the wonderful @saffronhuang, @mattyj612, @annarmitchell, @marannelson, and @_TamaraWinter, "Letters to a Young Technologist" ✨
saffron huang @saffronhuang
Seeing the value beyond instrumentalization makes sense to me.
However I take issue with your reading of Heidegger. He actually specifically goes out of his way to define technology as something other than instrumentalization--that the essence of technology is a function of the movement of destiny, the revealing of truth, and the ordering of the universe in order for such revealing to take place. Instrumentalization is a naive understanding of what technology is. The evolution of technology is rooted in far deeper existential realities than the instrumentality view permits. It's worth being pedantic about this point, because Heidegger's point calls on us to think beyond a mechanistic perspective, towards the divine, the spiritual, the metaphysical, the fatalistic. One cannot write seriously about technology without a genuine consideration of what the eschatology of technology is. Zizek does a really good job of this in "Hegel in a Wired Brain".