Techno-criticism

1. 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.
2. The feed did not wait for your intention: it was designed, on the scale of millions, to extract attention (the attention economy). 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.
3. And these transformations are often irreversible. Hans Jonas 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.

1. Mistrust of technology has a long history, and a poor record of predictions. Plato feared writing, others the novel, the railway, television: each time, the announcement of a softened mind, a broken bond, a lost generation.
2. Yet we learned to live with all of it. What was taken for the end of a world was only the discomfort of a habit to be formed. The moral panic often says less about the object it accuses than about the fear of those growing old alongside it.
3. Worse, this mistrust treats people as passive victims, incapable of judging and conducting themselves. By seeing manipulated dupes everywhere, one comes to scorn the ordinary freedom of users, and offers, for want of better, only a refusal no one will follow.

Therefore So to mistrust technology may be to repeat an old fear that has always been wrong, and to take people for less free than they are.

1. You say no tool is neutral, that every device shapes us. Granted. But then the book shapes us too, and writing, and the cathedral, and conversation governed by politeness: all of it steers attention and transforms our lives.
2. If « not neutral » is said of everything, the word no longer separates the feed that captures you from the library that elevates you. A critique that condemns all technology gives no means of choosing among them.
3. To tell the good device from the bad, one must after all return to what it does to us, to the end it serves, hence to its use and its effects. What mistrust wished to avoid, the examination of uses, it is now forced to return to.

Therefore So the critique holds only if it becomes discerning: not « all technology alienates us », but « this one, for this reason, does us a disservice ».