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ArgumentTechnology's own logic
Past a certain scale, technology no longer merely serves our ends: it imposes its own.
Supports
Jonas · The Imperative of Responsibility · 1979
- An isolated tool serves whoever uses it. But our technologies are no longer isolated tools: they form a system with its own logic, efficiency, measurement, growth, and our lives end up adjusting to it.
- The feed did not wait for your intention: it was designed, on the scale of millions, to extract attention (the ). What it transforms is not this or that use, it is our relation to time, to boredom, to the presence of others, without anyone having chosen it.
- And these transformations are often irreversible. drew from this a new duty: when our power lastingly commits our lives and those that follow, prudence is no longer timidity, it is responsibility.
Therefore So to be wary is not to refuse progress: it is to recognize that a system grown so powerful demands that we question its ends, and not only its uses.
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Deepenings
The technical system
- The sociologist Jacques Ellul called « the autonomy of technology » the moment when the totality of means stops obeying our ends and follows its single law, efficiency: no longer tools we choose, but an environment that chooses us.
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