I don’t like this way of thinking about technology, which philosophers of tech call the “instrumental” theory. Instead, I think that technology and society make each other together. Obviously, technology choices like mass transit vs cars shape our lives in ways that simpler tools, like a hammer or or whatever, don’t help us explain. Similarly, society shapes the way that we make technology.
In making technology, engineers and designers are constrained by the rules of the physical world, but that is an underconstraint. There are lots of ways to solve the same problem, each of which is equally valid, but those decisions still have to get made. How those decisions get made is the process through which we embed social values into the technology, which are cumulative in time. To return to the example of mass transit vs cars, these obviously have different embedded values within them, which then go on to shape the world that we make around them. We wouldn’t even be fighting about self-driving cars had we made different technological choices a while back.
That said, on the other side, just because technology is more than just a tool, and does have values embedded within it, doesn’t mean that the use of a technology is deterministic. People find subversive ways to use technologies in ways that go against the values that are built into it.
If this topic interests you, Andrew Feenberg’s book Transforming Technology argues this at great length. His work is generally great and mostly on this topic or related ones.
utopiah@lemmy.world 1 day ago
True, and yet a machine gun is a not a stethoscope.
ArchmageAzor@lemmy.world 1 day ago
A machine gun is a tool that is made with one purpose. A better comparison would be a hunting rifle, or even a hammer.
utopiah@lemmy.world 1 day ago
That… was my point!
petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
No, a hammer is useful.
fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works 16 hours ago
Right. It’s small, and compact, so you can fit in the bike, and quick swing to someone’s Dome just about does it. /s
Violence is a method of action, some tools are force multipliers in that action, and thus useful in that case.
Don’t get me wrong, hammers building houses and plow shears have done more to quietly change the world then guns and swords ever have, but guns and swords have.