Time and the Technium

I recently discovered that, in addition to his widely-read “Cool Tools” blog, former Wired executive editor and Long Now Foundation board member Kevin Kelly has a blog called “The Technium.” If you’ve never heard of it, go read a few entries. It’s everything I hope this blog could someday be.

In the inaugural post, “My Search for the Meaning of Tech,” Kelly introduces the idea of the Technium:

It’s a word I’ve reluctantly coined to designate the greater sphere of technology—one that goes beyond hardware to include culture, law, social institutions, and intellectual creations of all types.

We all have a habit of referring to only the leading edge of innovation as “technology”—in part, no doubt, because of the process of naturalization I described earlier. Things that count as “technology,” in our vernacular way of speaking, include computers, biotech, advanced manufacturing processes, space-aged alloys. Things that don’t count include bricks, novels, roads, languages.

In order to understand how technology and society evolve and transform each other, however, the concept must be freed from the contemporary moment. Technology is more than a handful of arbitrary categories that history has brought to momentary prominence. Once you drop the “cutting-edge” requirement, it becomes difficult to draw a line between artifacts that count as technology and those that don’t. Eventually, one must concede that technology includes all structures, concrete and abstract, which humans have created in order to bring about some imagined, desired end.

Viewed in this way, technology becomes inseparable from techne, one of Aristotle’s five categories of human knowledge. The study of technology becomes the study, not of artifacts or a disembodied historical force, but of human being and knowing.

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.