That which remains outside of technology

Nature and awareness as technology’s other

This post is an attempt to raise the questions about the limits and boundaries of technology. What is there that is not ’science applied’ or consumed or manipulated with the help of a machine of some kind? At first sight, the answers might seem obvious, but when you think about it, perhaps they are not as straightforward as we think. Asking what remains outside the reach of technology is both a question about what should we, technologists, keep our hands away from, and what, not created by humans, is worth defending to cultivate sustainable ways of living. It is also a question about the historical tensions between the secular and the spiritual.

In a recent paper about the lineage of digital technologies and their impact on human potential, Professor Françoise Paquienséguy writes:

Indeed, the Human appears to be limited by the body in the three dimensions of space and in that of time; therefore, there would be physical and material limits, or weaknesses, on which technology can certainly act concretely. But should we necessarily surpass them and seize upon technologies to achieve this? On the other hand, we have the impression that our mind, being more immaterial, could project itself infinitely and onto everything, including the technologies themselves. Could it be that humans are made of an unlimited spirit that creates technology, housed in a limited body served by it? — Françoise Paquienséguy (2024), Digital: The Promise of the Unlimited?

I suggest we can explore the answers through examining the concept of technology itself. ‘Technology’ with a capital T is a broad concept — perhaps too broad. Where does one draw the line on examining technology versus examining contemporary life? Has the omnipresence of technology in our lives given rise to a secular age where spirituality and religion do not have roles any more? Should we who work with technology in the 21st century, amidst multiple global crises, rethink technology’s boundaries —, and become better aware of what falls outside of technology and should remain there? Let’s start from the word’s origins.

Technique versus technology

There can be techniques without technologies. A technique is an established process, with proven results in its efficiency and outputs, but its invention did not necessarily involve any scientific inquiry — i.e. ‘technique’ does not fit the definition of technology as applied science nor does it necessarily involve a device. In pre-modern societies, many techniques for agriculture etc were discovered by trial and error without an analytical body of knowledge. ‘Technique’ has also been used, originally by Jacques Ellul, to describe the multiple ways modern technological inventions have overtaken our lives in the west and began to dominate nature, or even do away with it.

Technology, on the other hand, can be considered a singular technique or a set of them that emerges from the application of science and often finds its physical application through a machine of some sort and reaches a larger scale through such applications. Technology has a theoretical foundation, as Evandro Agazzi demonstrates:

the modern concept of technology can be interpreted as a new way of expressing the conceptual content of the Greek term techne. … Western civilization finds what is perhaps the most decisive element of its specificity—as regards other great civilisations in human history—in that it explicitly introduced the theoretical demand into the domain of practice and of doing. - Evandro Agazzi (1998) From Technique to Technology: The Role of Modern Science

‘Technology’ as a term became widely adopted after the first wave of industrialisation because the era embodied a development characterised by an accelerated application of modern science for the purposes of serial production and efficiency.

Frequently in historical accounts of technology, the authors bring up the idea that humans have been taking advantage of technologies in exerting control over nature since time immemorial. Various tools, ranging from the wheel to the plow, are mentioned.

Yet, other scholars have argued that while all that is accurate, the people at the time did not have the concept of technology. According to cultural historian Leo Marx, the word ‘technology’ came to fill a semantic void for our increasingly complex and interwoven relationship with technology, and not before the mid-1800s. (Leo Marx, 2010, “Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept”)

In the midst of the industrial revolution, the other words that were floated around included ‘machinery’ or ‘innovations in the mechanical arts’. However, as various technologies started coming together to enable something more grand — sociotechnical systems, such as the railroad infrastructure or the electric power grid — terms like ‘machinery’ started losing their explanatory power.

Marx identifies a parallel development after the Industrial Revolution where innovations such as the light bulb and the telephone stemmed more directly from advances in science, giving birth to “large, complex socio-technological systems”. A piece of machinery is bound by physical constraints, whereas complex technological (and other) systems operate beyond our individual fields of perception.

Technology as the inevitable force of progress

For Marx, technology is ‘a hazardous concept’ in that it conceals its origins in the relations between people and thus gains an autonomy as an inevitable force; a thing instead of a fundamentally human process. This development gained power from a related development in the notion of history, i.e. that history became a narrative of “a record of the steady, cumulative, continuous expansion of human knowledge of—and power over—nature.”

Consequently, the hazards from technology in the conceptual sense stem from

the peculiar role it enables us to confer on the mechanic arts as an ostensibly discrete entity—one capable of becoming a virtually autonomous, all-encompassing agent of change. — Marx, Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept), p 564.

Marx locates technology’s breakthrough as a more broadly acknowledged term to the founding of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1861. Yet, he mentions that “as late as 1911, the Encyclopaedia Britannica contained no entry on technology”.

It seems ‘technology’ retrofits itself to the past, while claiming to own the future.

The ‘black-boxification’ of 21st century technologies

What are us, who work with technology in the 21st century amidst multiple global crises, to make of this? Can we bask in the glory of having lived during the first century of technology’s true prominence?

In his essay “Athens, Jerusalem, and the arrival of techno-secularism”, John Caiazza writes about the relationship between technology and religion. He highlights how in the past, the functional qualities of technologies could be observed as transparent physical mechanisms:

In Victorian times, steam power was the main force used for technological advance, most obviously the steam train engines that even today have not lost their evocative power. The point of the nostalgia is that every aspect of the technology of a steam engine was open and available for inspection: fire box, water pipes, smoke stack, steam valves, reciprocating rods, driving wheels. The immense force of steam power pulling tons of iron and steel was understandable just through observation; there was romance but no mystery. — John C. Caiazza (2005) Athens, Jerusalem, and the arrival of techno-secularism.

In comparison, today’s information technologies are mysterious black boxes made from silicon. Caiazza’s example is the personal computer, but obviously since then we have seen it be miniaturised into smartphones and today’s ‘magical’ language models that some of us use via AI tools, such as ChatGPT. We have machine learning algorithms that operate with such fuzzy logic that even the experts wonder what is going on.

Caiazza’s point was that the magical qualities of technology are displacing religious practices and myths, and thus driving secularisation in contemporary societies.

Technology’s magic draws from creativity - but to what ends?

The archbishop emerita of the Church of Sweden, Antje Jackelén, has criticised Caiazza’s views. In her 2005 article, “What is “secular”? Techno-secularism and spirituality”, Jackelén suggests that the magical qualities of technologies arise from human creativity and mortality, rather than whether something operates observably instead of being miniaturised out of sight:

The magic does not lie in the experience of the hidden and mysterious over against the overt and explicit. Neither the idea of hiddenness nor the idea of fakery is enough to describe the magic dimension of technology. The magic dimension of technology resides instead with the expression of the tension between finitude and creativity. — Jackelén, p. 871.

Jackelén also notes that the relationship between the secular and nonsecular is more complex than a simple antagonism, as Caiazza seems to believe:

Religions do not deal exclusively with revealed knowledge. On the level of theological reflection as well as on the level of religious practice, secular knowledge plays quite a role. In fact, what goes into the words of proclamation, the words of pastoral care, and the words of prayer emanates to a considerable extent from empirical and secular knowledge. Holy Scriptures, as for example the Bible, integrate secular knowledge. - Jackelén, p. 865.

Jackelén puts forward that while it can appear that the application of science in the form of various technologies has led to an omnipresent secularism, the same is true for study and practice of religions as well. She writes (ibid.): “If we can speak of scientific secularism, we can also speak of theological secularism.”

Does religion take shape in technology?

Jackelén sees that with technology pervading our lives, religion is changing rather than being displaced (p. 869). Back in 2005, she observed three aspects relevant to whether Caizza’s techno-secularism actually exists: first, the increase in private practice of religion, second, the emergence of new types of churches within Christianity that are strongly reliant on the use of media technologies, and finally, ‘cyber-spirituality’ i.e. virtual communities centred around religious practices.

Jackelén refers to Philip Hefner’s article ‘Technology and Human Becoming’ and his observation that “we create technology to compensate for our finitude” — a quote I have addressed as well. Hefner claims that technology has religious dimensions, but they don’t surface in the ways we talk about technology:

If we speak about technology at its deepest levels, we are at the same time speaking about its religious dimensions, even if we do not use conventional religious terminology (Hefner 2003, 73).

Jackelén wants to see technology as a set of tools with which we negotiate the poles of finitude and freedom (as articulated by Paul Tillich), much like religion does. Therefore, technologies enable creative ways of exploring questions of mortality and the limits of human capabilities, such as ingenuity, and so on:

On the one hand, technology represents an attempt to come to terms with our finitude. It extends our life options both in space and time. It brings what is distant close, allowing us to influence for better or worse that which is very remote. It extends our lifetimes, and it extends the influence of our generation over a multitude of future generations. Without technology the average lifespan would be dramatically shorter. For thousands of years to come, people will have to watch the waste that the use of nuclear technology in our time has generated. The use of technology transcends the limits of natural finitude in ways that affect the being and nonbeing of human life and of all life as we know it. On the other hand, technology uses the highest power of imagination, creativity, and freedom humans are capable of. It is where mortality and creativity meet. It is where the limit of death touches the freedom of imagination. Jackelén, p. 870.

While I agree with Jackelén’s sentiment, I find her rhetoric about technology concerning; she uses expressions such as “technology uses the highest power of imagination”, i.e. positing technology as a non-human force. In such turns of phrase, the human element in developing and using technologies gets abstracted, up to a point where it seems that the technology is the only thing with agency. The devil’s advocate reading — and the sentiment of technologists, by and large — is that If technologies enable us to negotiate the tension of finitude and freedom (as Jackelén argues), surely we should progress them in all kinds of avenues, and that is a virtue in itself!

We are back to technology as a hazardous concept, in Leo Marx’ words, with the risk that we leave technologies’ role as manifestations of absolute progress unquestioned and unexamined.

The machine that strives to conquer everything

Returning to the topic of secularism, Paul Kingsnorth argues as a counterpoint, following Ivan Illich and others, that society has not gone secular but that the notion of the sacred, or any religious impulses, has been replaced by, first, the state, and then the global marketplace. Values around people, place, and prayer had been supplanted by science, sex, and the self, writes Kingsnorth.

Kingsnorth acknowledges technology in these developments as a driving force. He ties it to the notion of ‘The Machine’, i.e. the technocratic systems that govern contemporary life, ultimately attempting to replace nature with technology. Geoengineering technologies are some of the most concrete manifestations of this, but so are the surveillance technologies and the ‘smart’ technologies that are creeping to take hold of our cities. They reinforce the expanding tentacles with which technologies (over)reach our ways of living and grab our surroundings.

In the ever-expanding sphere of technology, the will of The Machine is driven by technocracy, i.e. beliefs about the omnipotency of technology. We find such techno-solutionist powers being promoted across the various layers of society by technologists, investors, and politicians. Ultimately, The Machine aims, in its quest for omnipotency, to become god.

What remains outside of technology?

As the machine, and the technology that propels it, is increasingly overtaking the planet, what remains? What is there that is not ’science applied’ or consumed or manipulated with the help of a machine of some kind?

I find that the term technology is at times used metaphorically, for example when attributed to language, i.e. seeing language as something similar to technology due to language being “invented by humans to solve the challenge of explicit and high-fidelity communication”. But in doing that, are we discussing the embodied behaviour of an organism as a mechanism — i.e. something to be subordinated to machine metaphors? Are we implying that a greater understanding can only be attained by such a manoeuvre, instead of embracing the embodied aspect of the behaviour on its terms? Is the discursive manoeuvre another step in how The Machine extends its reach over nature and replaces it?

What about the mind? We offload cognitive tasks to technologies, e.g. when we use our smartphone and a maps app to navigate in a city. Or, we augment our body by offloading physical activities to devices designed to amplify our capabilities, such as strength when using a crank to lift a car. Or we use computers as ‘the bicycle for the mind’, as Steve Jobs put it, to amplify our creativity and problem-solving.

Yet, today it seems that many of the other, non-computerised bicycles for the mind — poetry, writing, drawing, etc — are being computerised rather than the computers serving us as tools for human self-expression.

Nature and awareness remain, to be defended

Where does that leave us? While technological development does its best to control, predict, extract, and manipulate nature, it cannot replace it. Nature is worth defending from technological onslaught brought about by The Machine.

The other thing worth defending and cultivating is awareness. Not in the meaning of being aware of something — various technologies pull our attention towards them. Rather, in the sense it is understood in Vedantic thought, for example: as the ever-present ground of being that connects us to nature and others. It can be found in the stillness of our minds - through contemplative practices. While pure awareness is found turning inward, it is as expansive and continuous as the space that we and other living beings inhabit.

Accessing awareness might be labelled a ’psycho-technology’ but I’d rather not retrofit centuries-old practices under the term. No technology can capture awareness in itself. Therefore no technology can capture what emanates from pure awareness either, such as attention towards the well-being of others. We may call that love.

Thank you for reading.

With love and kindness,

Aki