1- Heidegger’s concluding paradox (p35)
“Because the essence of technology is nothing technological, essential reflection upon technology and decisive confrontation with it must happen in a realm that is, on the one hand, to the essence of technology and, on the other, fundamentally different from it.”
sets itself up as a rhetorical question that seemingly has no answer, but if technology is “a means to an end”(p 4), could it not be assumed that the base form of technology is ultimately to reveal itself and unravel this paradox?
2 – Giedion writes about how “the ancients gave little thought to lending their inventive powers to practical ends” (p 34), and how their use of these tools was purely for pleasure, not utilitarian uses. How could this be reconciled with the abundance of distractions we create for ourselves with computers now? Think of phone apps that leverage powerful technology, but for simple entertainments. What are the practical ends we are missing?
3 – sort of trailing on question 2, Giedion also acknowledges that many of these tools were not applied to areas of (now seemingly) obvious use because the ‘ancients’ relied on slave labor and didn’t see a practical, task based use for them. Parallel this with “America’s original contribution, the mechanizing of the complicated craft” (p 39) that rose up after slavery was outlawed in the US. If we have a surplus of technology that isn’t being applied to a task, and there’s historical precedent that slave labor or indentured servitude are areas that could have been eliminated, or labor eased based on the technology at the time though no one thought to apply it, who today are we enslaving by not applying these tools in ‘utilitarian’ fashion? There’s a lot of rhetoric about people losing their jobs to automation and technology, but who is not benefiting from this?
A thought about the 2 required readings and their connections : Generally, I found a train of thought that flows from Heidegger’s musings on technology as a way of revealing (p12) and Giedion’s reference to Oresme’s recognition that “movement can only be represented by movement” (p16). It reminds me of Bret Victor‘s argument for finding new ways of thinking about computation and interaction. Why should our low-level systems of interaction with computers be limited to traditional text based means of representation? Does this limit the potential of computers and our capability of ‘revealing’ or ‘becoming’ through them?
