Shiny plastic cases

One of the things that fascinates me about technology is what I call technological encapsulation, the process of obfuscation by which the engineering miracle is brought down to earth and made humane.

We’re really not all that interested in how the gadget got here. We only want it to exist, ready-to-hand, to help us in satisfying our wants and needs. And so we hide each of its Aristotelian causes, except the final cause, which is our own reason for employing it.

Like a grain of sand in an oyster shell, the technological artifact must be physically enclosed. Otherwise, its rude workings may remind us of the inferiority of our understanding to that of the technologists who created it. Thus its formal and material causes are hidden from view. And since we might object to the environmental or socioeconomic misdeeds that were likely involved in the creation of any modern artifact, its production process is hidden behind factory walls, in foreign nations, and concealed as an industrial secret.

Of course, we must be complicit in the process of technological encapsulation; if we wanted to open the case or research the production process, we could. And some people do—but this is a distinctly different attitude in approaching the object than the manufacturer intends, or most people practice.

If the process of encapsulation is complete, the technological artifact will enter our world as a “natural” object, or at least a humane one. But the process is almost never complete, and so most artifacts require the passing of a generation to become naturalized.

Witness, for instance, the phenomenon of typewritten text. An entire generation of writers railed against the dehumanizing aspects of the clattering mechanical beast. Of course, the pen it replaced was also unnatural, strictly speaking, but had the advantage of familiarity. Now, typewriters are quaint collectibles, calling to mind a more romantic era when the novel was king and writing was still performed with mechanical devices in physical space. And modern techies of a conservative bent swear by “plain text,” i.e., typewritten text, as the simplest, most honest incarnation of the written word.