In a Nutshell
This was written in response to L. M. Sacasas' recent post on The Frailest Thing:
A truly thought provoking piece.
Some of the strains in the post and their echoes in the first comment lead me to add my own take by describing the distinction I've come to between Technology and the broader human capacity to make things, what was known as Craft before the term, and the practices it describes, came un-moored in a world bedazzled by Technology. The way I see it, Craft, as the words Germanic origins imply, stems from and works with strength. Technology, as I define it, has displaced the connection between making and our using our own strengths, whether physical or mental or spiritual, in the making of things, replacing this physical relationship with a seduction compelled by the promises of Power.
I define the distinction between Strength and Power as growing out of the difference between an embodied capacity to exert a force and the desire and Will to subsume one's self in a bargain with an expectation of harnessing an external force. Beyond the obvious differences between, say, wielding a hammer before a forge and putting enormous efforts and Will and sacrifice – mostly by others – into splitting the atom; we have the fundamentally different, opposing, perspectives of the two realms of activity. Strength is gained, earned, and knows its capacities and limits. Power is taken, and in the taking demands that we fall for a fundamental illusion: that we can have something for nothing. That we get what we think we want and whatever harmful consequences might result will not touch us. That they will always remain unintended consequences, left off the ledger.
Another way to look at it is that Craft resides in the hand of the maker. Technology exists as a recipe to be followed and elaborated on, but as with software code, never fully understood. Never graspable by anyone in its entirety. Craft is graspable, but what we can "hold in the hand" is never reducible to a Quantity. Never reducible to a recipe. The hand is a metaphor of an embodied relationship with Quality. The recipe is an aggregate of Quantities, of ever-proliferating piles of dead data.
What makes this moment we find our selves in so fraught is that we've reached a point when the erosion of the stores of Craft experience have left so few us with any inkling of what Craft entails. What it means. At the same time the proliferating immersion within the assumptions of Technology-chasing-Power leaves us within an expanding blind spot in relation to its always more spectacular fantasies. We are increasingly credulous of the most glaringly outlandish claims for what Technology will bring us while we rapidly lose the capacity, through a form of learned helplessness, to apprehend Quality. So that we fail to see what is lost as we rush after those promises. This mad rush after the Mega-machine is now reaching its apotheosis in our concerted efforts to destroy as much of life on this Earth as we can manage.
Narcissus is the perfect image to represent this situation. Craft does cannot exist without self-mastery. Technology promises the Ego its heart's desire.
The urge to Technologize arises from the same source as the drive towards magic. It relies on the same desire to achieve results through short-cuts and uses the same way of organizing activity by creating recipes, programs to be followed so as to arrive at a given result. Both require a certain level of self-delusion. Both chase after impossible dreams while ignoring the damage done.