Technology: Poison and Cure
The ubiquity of digital technologies in the modern era has become a defining feature of the age. Given that we emerge from the technologies of our past, and that we are always participants in the technologies of what is current, human beings can be considered technical in their very nature. It is technology which allowed our minds to evolve to be what they are today.
The French philosopher Bernard Stiegler points out, however, that technology is a pharmakon, a Greek word meaning both poison and cure. Stiegler highlights the dual nature of our technological relationship. On the one hand we find our lives significantly improved by technology. We are subject to much less hard labour, we live with convenience, we are relatively safe and very few go hungry. But on the other hand we find ourselves distracted, unable to think for ourselves, dependent and increasingly unfamiliar with our own bodies.
And so it is not technology per se which is troubling, rather, it is our relationship to it. Increasingly, our relationship with technology limits our understanding of the world. That may sound counter-intuitive, given the access to knowledge we now have. But consider what defines technology: it is instrumental. That is, it allows us a means to an end. With the ubiquity and pervasiveness of modern technology, we have come to see everything as a means to an end, rather than of value in and of itself.
Martin Heidegger suggests that the technological has become our default existential attitude, and that is what is the major problem with technology in the modern age. Not that there is too much of it, or that it is destructive, but that we live in an existential relationship with people and the world which is itself technological (i.e. instrumental). This affects our perception, he says, so that we can only perceive that which is instrumental. It sets up a domineering and aggressive stance toward being, and through this stance the world is revealed to us as a field of commodities to be used as means to ends.
But how can we step outside of our instrumental relationship to things? There is difficulty in proposing responses which are non-instrumental. This difficulty lies in the fact that our culture by default thinks in terms of optimization, expediency and consumption. Heidegger suggested that “we can affirm the unavoidable use of technical devices, and also deny them the right to dominate, so as to warp, confuse and lay waste our nature”. It seems that in order to do this we must cultivate, by giving our attention to, what is not subject purely to our desire to extract, enhance, optimize, consume. That is, toward a relationship to things which are generative and slow, rather than consuming and expedient.
