Toward a Pragmatic Philosophy of Technology Pt. 3: Framework and Practices

You decide what technologies you are in relationship with

Photo by Miguel Á. Padriñán: https://www.pexels.com/photo/green-circuit-board-343457/

This is the final part of a three part series. Here are parts one and two.

As a part of this project, I curated a playlist. It evolved into a musical exploration of the ways various artists have discussed technology and the other ideas I’ve mentioned in this series.

If you use Reddit and you like this series, I created a subreddit dedicated to the philosophy of technology called PhiloTech. I hope to continue the conversation there.

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I’ve been building up to this point. In part one of this series, I framed the necessity of having a pragmatic philosophy of technology. This argument revolved around the inability to responsibly integrate ethics into technology companies, among some other points. Part two went into a primer on both pragmatism and an introduction to philosophy of technology. Each of these sections deserve a much longer and thorough treatment than I can give them now. My immediate goal with this series was to help organize these thoughts I’ve been having about technology in a way that I can come back later and explore them more in-depth academically later.

The last part of this series will give you a way (emphasis on a, as it is not the only one) of looking at technology, and give you some tools that you can use to navigate this way of looking at technology. This first direction we go is maybe the least likely of all… into Amish communities.

The Amish Relationship With Technology

The Amish have been parodied in our media for some time now. They are depicted as plain people who are inherently anti-technology. Even the godfather of parody, “Weird” Al Yankovic has parodied the Amish.

These depictions are a distortion (incidental or purposeful is not the point here) of Amish reality. The Amish (speaking generally, there are different Amish sects who vary in their allowance of technology) are not anti-technology, but instead their relationship to technology is mediated through Amish values which is deliberated on by the community. The adoption of cars, electricity, and even internet to some degree are all part of a Amish religious value-laden deliberation on the technology.

For more on this topic, NPR has a great article on Amish technology.

Understanding a Nature of Technology

This section is the one that confuses me the most. It was the reasons I knew I needed some more time to think about this and so wrote an intermission post instead. The question I’ve been toying with is, “what is the nature of technology such that our conversations about it in the short term are fundamentally different than they should be in the long term?” Let me clarify what I mean by this question.

I’ve been mired in an electric vehicle (EV) charging project as a part of some undergraduate research I’ve been doing. As part of this research, we hosted workshops with experts in various areas relevant to EV charging, from grid infrastructure, to equity. While there is much to take away from this project (and we are slowly working on a paper to communicate quite a bit of it), one of the things the workshop highlighted is that when people talk about technology in the short term, people default to incremental conversations. In the long term however (and using a tool that I will talk about later), requires a fundamentally different way of talking about it. When talking about how EV charging in twenty years, for example, it is not enough to ask where to put the next n charging stations, there are numerous knock on effects that become significantly more important than that. Things like equity, technology transitions and the like.

What is it about technology in the long term is different about it in the short term? For this I have two different potential answers. One of them comes from an interpretation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s work. Wittgenstein was a philosopher from Austria who, for the purposes of this article, put some significant thought into language. Langdon Winner, who I mentioned in part two, interprets Wittgenstein’s concept of “ways of life”. In this interpretation, there is a point in time of a technology, for Winner’s assessment, where a technology stops being a tool (within some ways of talking about it) and becomes a part of the human experience. Look at how smart phones have reshaped our methods of talking to each other for example. In other words for Winner, and this is the language I’ve adopted, there is a point in time in the adoption of a technology where a technological artifacts starts to lose its “tool-like qualities” and become a part of our humanity.

This is the first reason our conversations around technology must be different. In the short term, we have to talk about technology within the context of its “tool-ness” but in the long term we have to become aware of how the technology becomes embedded into our experiences.

The second potential answer to this question requires us to look at another way of looking at technology. Frederick Ferré in his 1988 book Philosophy of Technology mentions that technology is not simply a product of knowledge. For Ferré, technology is the product of the co-conspirator of knowledge and values. Our primary means of knowledge as a western society is science, and main means of morality and values is religion (note: I do not agree that religion is the primary means by which we learn morality, this is an artifact of me paraphrasing Ferré.) Science and moral valuation exist in parallel and when there is enough synergy between the two, a technology is created.

This is where we learn of the second way to think about how to answer the question of the outset. We talk about technology different in the short term, under this framing, because when we become acquainted with a new technology we are usually not fully aware of the knowledge or values embedded within a technology and as such we are reduced, in a matter of speaking, to only talking about technology by means of its apparent capability. In the long-term we become aware (or at least some part of the population does) of the knowledge and values embedded within a technology and from this standpoint can challenge the implications of those.

So What Do We Do?

If I left you here, I think many could take this and infer what to do. It is apparent that we need to get better at thinking long-term about technology, no matter which way we decide to answer the question: the knowledge-values way or the tool-to-human-expression way. This could arm the inferring reader with the foresight to look at how the embedded knowledge and values of a new technology impact the things that they value the most and make a critical decision. It would enable someone to say, “after the tool-qualities of this technology have shedded, what social, environmental, economic, and political consequences are we left with?” These are both valid inferences. But for the sake of being thorough, I’ll introduce some tools which I believe will get you to the same outcome.

Foresight/Futures Studies

(Note: I am using Foresight and Futures Studies interchangeably, though some make distinctions. While I think it is an important argument for the community to continue to engage in, for the sake of this work I will use them synonymously.)

It will take more space than I currently have to properly define futures studies and foresight, so for the sake of this article I will define it broadly with the more specific contextual nuance of when certain tools are employed or when certain terms are correct over others saved for another time. Roughly understood then, futures studies is a set of tools and methodologies that use the lens of the future to expand perspectives on a given topic. The practice involves looking to some future timeline, say 20 years from now, and using methods like inference, or imagination, or statistics to explore the impacts of the topic at hand. The body of research here is significant and if you’re interested in even part of what I have expressed here, I recommend reading volume one of Foundations of Futures Studies by Wendell Bell.

The recommendation of futures studies itself is too broad for the task of giving you tools that help you navigate your relationship with technology in a way that is consistent with the short- and long-term phenomenological consequences as expressed above. While there are many tools and methodologies in this practice that can facilitate this relationship (a runner-up in this regard was explaining Jane McGonigal’s expression of episodic future thinking (EFT)), the focus will be on any method that uses a participatory foundation.

Participatory futures approaches are a means of engaging in collective imagining about a topic and to consider the possibilities, consequences, and even opportunities within the imagined future. This practice of gathering people from, preferably, different backgrounds to engage in critical and imaginative thinking on a technology at hand gets to the heart of a pragmatic philosophy of technology, being able to explore the consequences, possibilities, and opportunities of a technology as it relates to our long-term experience with it.

FractalVersing

While participatory futures techniques are great for when you can get people together, we also need tools that we can use to explore when we’re on our own. This is where FractalVersing comes in. I discovered FractalVersing by utter accident via one of my long strolls through Reddit, but as soon as I saw it, I knew the value. I’ve also had a quick chat with Fraser Scott, the creator of FractalVersing and am excited to explore these ideas with him further. So what is FractalVersing? I’ll borrow Fraser’s words for description.

FractalVersing is a method of creating little statements called "verses" related to a subject that help you reflect on, understand, and interpret different situations or events. Use them to guide decision-making, problem-solving, brainstorming, or any other meditation on a subject.

I will not go over how to do FractalVersing on this article, Fraser’s site already does that well. Instead, I will talk about what ways to frame your FractalVersing in order to achieve the ends that I’m discussing. The first important step is to make sure that when you are anchoring your ontology to a subject that you ensure that your subject is a technology (that’s very obvious but worth saying). For the later interpretation stage, or in other words, once you have built your verses and are putting the ontology to use, you have to make sure that you are embedding your inquiry in a socio-technological context. The example given is building a mobile app, I’d argue that in order to best explore the dynamics as it relates to the short- and long-term points of consideration for technology that you find something that combines a piece of technology and some part of the human experience.

The outcome of this will be a deeply nuanced exploration of the piece of technology you had in consideration. Those considerations will be rooted in an ontological understanding that would be difficult to get using other exploration methods.

Grammar as a Means of Being Aware

I’ve been giving you tools that work at different levels of application. Participatory futures works with groups of varying sizes, FractalVersing (while it can be used as a group activity) is for individual and deliberate exploration, but there’s one more level “down” that I think is just as important. I’m talk about a tool that you can use as simple lens of viewing. It’s less deliberate than FractalVersing. It’s not something you deliberate get a sheet of paper out for or something, but something you can use as another lens to look at your technological experiences. What I’m talking about is grammar (obviously because you can read those headings up there).

In keeping in tradition of the spirit of philosophy, I have to engage in a bit of definition-making. When I’m talking about grammar, I’m not talking about it in the way that you typically think of, syntax of sentences and all that, though I am talking about something similar. I come to this term as there have been multiple sources that have taken Wittgenstein’s approach to language and sought to apply it to technology. I’ve mentioned some of them in this series and there are yet more that have done so.

In a really quick manner of speaking there are two types of grammar as it relates to technology: there is the syntactical level (and now I’m pulling this directly from the work of Leon Pezzica and his work on Deep Technogrammar) which is about the connections of a piece of technology. It is how one component of a piece of technology is connected to another, such as how the lever/arm of a toaster relates to the electromagnet within it. It is also about how it connects to other parts of a wider system. The other side of syntactical grammar is deep grammar which is the ways that technology becomes embedded within our social systems.

When considering a technology, we usually use a syntactical grammar (albeit a narrow version of it), by having these two kinds of grammars by which to navigate our encounters of technologies, we can be explicit in our awareness of the connections and the transcendental and social dimensions of technology as they become parts of our human experience.

Conclusion

The questions that technologies leave us with are multidimensional and highly complex. Even this three part exploration left out significant philosophical and social questions such as “what even is technology” (which turns out to be an interesting question. It avoids getting into any potential metaphysical considerations, though considering them and considering how they break down would help significantly in developing this idea. This series leaves me with much more work to do. I have set this series out as a stepping stone by which I would force myself to get “more academic” in my exploration. So, while this exploration is admittedly in complete one, it serves to me as a giant step in a direction I’ve felt myself needing to go.

I hope in my exploration of these concepts, that I have left you with something that will get you to critically consider your relationship with technology and the awareness of how technologies embed themselves as ways of life for us. I made sure in this exploration that I didn’t leverage on any value judgements of technology. I didn’t want my embrace or rejection of any specific technology to get in the way of the particular thoughts that are more important than our current relationships with any technology.