You’re reading DisAssemble, a biweeklyish philosophy of tech newsletter aimed at those interested in creating better digital products.
"As a UX designer, it will be your job to explore use cases for the technology that the engineers create. The engineers create the AI solutions - you'll help in figuring out how to apply these solutions," the in-house recruiter said to me.
I was on the phone, applying for a job at an AI company and the distracted, yet fast-talking recruiter was unspooling her rehearsed spiel to me.
Really, it was a disclaimer, meant to let me know who was in charge: the engineers. The technology. Somehow, the solutions came first, and the problems that catalysed the need for solutions came after. Reverse causality.
In the company’s eyes, the technology was the ends, and the human the means.
I left that interview disheartened, but gripped with firm resolve: if I get the job I could make the company believe that technology should only be created with defined human or societal challenges in mind.
Looking back some years later, I can see that my idealism was, though well-meaning, a bit absurd; changing the mindset of such an engineer-led AI organisation wouldn't just be upsetting the apple-cart, it would be setting it alight.
Yet my hopeless idealism paled in comparison to the absurdity of the idea that a company needed someone to tell them: Hey, maybe we shouldn't be building technology then manufacturing problems for it to solve?
The faith that the CEO of this organisation must have had in AI speaks not to a rationality (which startup types are so often inclined towards), but rather a zealotry. I spoke in my last newsletter about this zealotry, which I called the Silicon Valley Mindset (SVM): a solution-first, techno-idealist, libertarian way of seeing the world, which sees itself as apolitical and rational.
This CEO, and even the company at large, likely held this mindset. For them, with their hammer, everything would have appeared as a nail.
And this isn't to disparage blue-sky R&D, which certainly has its place, but whole fields, entire product-led companies devoted towards being technology first - and particular technology first - is a different matter entirely.
If you are of this mindset you will behave in certain ways. If you sell autonomous cars, for any challenge related to transportation, you will propose autonomous cars no matter how suitable autonomous cars are to the problem space and no matter the externalities of delivering autonomous cars as a solution. No matter the congestion. No matter the urban sprawl.
This isn’t just capitalism at work. This is a system appearing a certain way due to a linguistic and cognitive framing. It’s an ontological premise that screams to be examined, if for no other reason than it has become hidden through ubiquity.
Luckily for us, the philosopher Martin Heidegger provides terms which help to unconceal these premises.
Broadly, he argues that technology, especially modern technology, 'enframes' (he calls this gestell) the world in certain ways. Consider ‘enframing’ to be challenging, or demanding, the world to be (or ‘reveal’) itself as a particular type of thing.
He gives us an example: a simple windmill, perhaps on a farm, that grinds grain. The windmill does not transform, store, change or challenge forth energy from the wind. The wind is there and is not materially altered as a system. It simply blows as it it did prior to the windmill being there. In this way the windmill is a technology that does not enframe, but is more like poiesis, a method of ‘revealing’ that gathers forth materials in harmony with the environment.
Heidegger compares this to a hydroelectric dam, which alters the landscape and river into a form that is able to unlock energy from the water, storing it and transmitting it. The environment is challenged to appear as a source of energy for the dam. This results from the environment being transformed into something it wasn't previously. The 'challenge' is a very specific wording, meant to connote the conflict that results from a system of relations where something is subordinated, or not treated for what it is, but rather what it could be.
In this way things - the environment - becomes a sort of a ‘standing reserve’, what Heidegger calls bestand. That is, the world becomes a 'standing reserve’ to be 'challenged forth’ to be part of a technology. Heidegger sees the dam altering the river, the Rhine now at the command of man, ready to supply power to the electric plant.
The power of Heidegger’s analysis is the sweeping way it interrelates how technology, people and the world interact. It’s not the human element that ‘enframes’ the world to be a ‘standing reserve’. It’s part of the entires system of relations involving a causal relationship of how technology creates expectation:
“Only to the extent that man for his part is already challenged to exploit the energies of nature can this ordering revealing happen. If man is challenged, ordered, to do this, then does not man himself belong even more originally than nature within the standing-reserve?”
In other words, people are part of this system of relations, in which they too are ‘challenged forth’ to be or do something.
A specific technology creates a situation where it challenges forth people to think a particular way, to be a part of a causal relationship. The way technology has ‘enframed’ the world creates a challenge for us to perceive and act upon this enframing.
It’s an interesting concept that inverts how we normally think about technology. Normally, we consider mindsets prior to technology, not subsequent. Heidegger gives the example of physics in contradistinction to this approach:
“…physics, indeed already as pure theory, sets nature up to exhibit itself as a coherence of forces calculable in advance, it orders its experiments precisely for the purpose of asking whether and how nature reports itself when set up in this way.”
The technology involved in experimental physics enframes the natural world to appear as it does to us - as physics, with all its constituent concepts and measurements.
But digital technology is fundamentally different from a windmill or a hydroelectric dam or a telescope. What would digital technology ‘challenge forth’ from us, and thus from the world?
Digital technology is a generalised technology - that is, it’s not like a screwdriver or cement mixer. Ultimately, it’s aggregated transistors that allow for calculation at astronomical scales. But it’s a a foundational technology that can, almost like an idea or theory, be applied to many different contexts. This creates a situation where the world is challenged to be calculated - to be a problem with a solution. The world is positioned within a rational calculation, to be deduced through formal logic.
In such a world, the bestand (standing reserve) is problems. This is how technology enframes the world. And these problems are bounded (that is, examinable and solvable by looking only within a certain context), rather than complex, messy interweavings of the irrational, the social, the cultural and the historical.
In Uncanny Valley: A Memoir, Anna Weiner, a newbie to Silicon Valley, expresses her amazement at this type of thinking, rife within the tech world:
Technologists broke down infrastructure and institutions, examined the parts, and redesigned systems their way. College dropouts re-architected the university, skinning it down to online trade schools. Venture capitalists unbundled the subprime mortgage crisis, funding startups offering home loans.
And of course, it is digital technology that instigates this framing of the calculable. The way to complete this calculation then, is through digital technology. Everything is seen through this lens, thus the answer is always digital technology. AI can apply to any problem. Apps can solve anything. Big data will make everything clear.
This is true for the AI company I applied to work at as well. Technology enframed the world such that the company was challenged to see the technology first, everything was thus seen through this lens.
This is not to deny that digital technology has been impactful and efficacious. In fact, it’s to wholeheartedly agree. Heidegger notes that in situations like this, where nature is enframed to be the most calculable, where challenging nature has resulted in correct determinations, gestell (enframing) is at its most powerful, and invisible.
It is so natural, such a given, that its contingency becomes hidden (this is what I was talking about in a previous newsletter - about understanding the dasien you are in). It's very difficult to see what the system of relations is challenging us (and things) to be when it is so ubiquitous and seemingly efficacious.
In other words: we do not see how the the world is being challenged, reconstructed as a problem-solution paradigm, with us being challenged to be the facilitators of digital solutions - the ‘efficient cause’ - when technology, and its ‘challenging’ of problems and solutions, has (apparently) worked so well. Indeed, in such cases, Heidegger argues that the main task of human is securing the ‘standing reserve’, and that all other ‘modes of revealing’ tend to disappear.
These premises - us and the world as something like mechanisms in service of technology - are not pleasant.
But neither is being a nazi. Which Heidegger was.
His participation in nazism was somewhat ambiguous, and the totalitarian, mechanised nazi nation may seem to be at odds with the vibe you may be getting from my description of his beliefs - a disgust with the instrumental way we used ourselves and the world for technology. But it seems Heidegger turned to what he saw as a romantic, steely Germany to save the day from the soulless, mechanised communist east and capitalist west.
So is such authoritarianism the only way to protect ourselves from the system of relations that enframes the world based on the technology to hand, that creates problems and solutions prior to actually understanding the world?
No. Obviously. We can design technology, and understand technology and ourselves - that is, can reveal the world - in ways that are more elucidating. Perhaps in ways that are more poiesis that gestell. But that’s for next time.
Stay well.