Is the tool neutral?
On the axis: Relation to technology · the tool
A tool, we are told, is neither good nor bad in itself, everything depending on its use; but does a weapon, or a news feed engineered to capture the eye, really carry no slope of its own?
The feed you scroll is only one case among a thousand. The same question holds for the car, the printing press, or artificial intelligence: do we pay for what technology brings with a hidden price, and who decides that price?
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Justification
starts from the current definition, technology as a means in the service of human ends, and calls it "correct" but not "true": it misses the essence, which rules out instrumentalism from the start. Modern technology is a mode of revealing that no longer lets things come forth, as craftsmanly poiesis did, but "challenges" them (herausfordern): the Rhine is ordered to deliver its energy to the power plant, the forest its cellulose, everything becomes standing-reserve (Bestand), a stock always on call. The human being is itself requisitioned by this challenging and threatened with understanding itself only in terms of availability. The gathering of all these ways of ordering, (Gestell), is the supreme danger, for it risks closing off every other relation to being. Heidegger nonetheless refuses to curse the apparatus: he quotes Hölderlin (where danger is, grows the saving power also) and recommends, in the 1955 speech collected in , a "yes and no" to technical objects: his critique targets the essence, not the instruments.
The Question Concerning Technology (lecture 1953, publ. 1954) · Discourse on Thinking ("Memorial Address", 1955, publ. 1959)
Justification
The analysis of everydayness describes idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity as modes of a falling in which existence scatters and flees from itself (§35-38); this agitation is a flight in the face of death, which the "" tranquillizes (§51). In 1955 diagnoses a "flight from thinking": busy calculative thinking never pauses for meditative thinking, which asks us to dwell on what is near. This is not a theory of diversion, but his answer is to gather one's attention on what matters rather than be distracted from it.
Being and Time, §35-38, §51 · Discourse on Thinking ("Memorial Address", 1955, publ. 1959)
Justification
For , technique is not the machine: it is the ensemble of rational methods that seek, in every field, the maximal efficiency available, a logic that takes over the economy, administration, propaganda and the human being itself. It has become autonomous: it expands of itself, through the automatic choice of the most efficient means, and political, economic and moral institutions tend to conform to its demands, which reduces their capacity for control. He rejects the idea of a neutral technology in which everything would depend on use: its good and bad effects are inseparable. He does not preach the destruction of machines: he asks that we desacralize technology, the condition of a freedom that remains possible.
The Technological Society (1954) · The Technological System (1977) · The Technological Bluff (1988)
leads to: Attention and diversion (Captured attention)