Technical neutrality is an illusion
As anticipated in last week's post we are pleased to publish another excerpt from the book by Mario Ricciardi and Sara Sacco "The poisoned apple". At the origins of artificial intelligence. These are the pages of Mario Ricciardi dedicated to Heidegger. The German philosopher conducted an important reflection on the role and significance of technology in the human condition. This reflection found its point of synthesis and systematic exposition in a 1960 prolusion also available in Italian translation. It is not an easy-to-use text and also requires being familiar with the architecture of Heidegger's thought on being and metaphysics. There are in this text lightning and "unusually understandable" insights into Heidegger's linguistic scheme, which make it a fundamental contribution to the contemporary debate about the consequences of the technological revolution on the destiny of man.
It's not that Heidegger is a technophobe or a technophile. Perhaps more the former than the latter. However, this dualism is left to us who live in a society pervaded by technology. There is no value judgment in Heidegger's reflection on technique. There is no rejection, no acceptance, no indifference. He clearly writes in the quoted essay: “The danger is not the technique. There is nothing demonic about the technique; but there is the mystery of its essence”. Here's the thing: the essence ed it is "the mystery of his essence" that must be revealed and that it will be liberating. We cannot escape this unveiling, because that of technology is a destiny, from which no one can escape. He still writes:
We always remain prisoners of the technique and chained to it, whether we accept it enthusiastically or vehemently deny it.
Nor can we cower into the idea that, substantially, technology is something neutral and what determines its essence is its use by an entity from which it emanates. No!, the neutrality of technology is something unsustainable and an illusion showing the slumber of being. The technique detaches itself and becomes an entity on its own which no longer springs from the entity. The German thinker writes:
“The power of technology that everywhere, hour after hour, in any form of use, pursues, drags, captivates today's man. This power has grown enormously and far exceeds our will, our ability to decide, because it does not come from us”. In his introduction to the "Question of technique" Federico Sollazzo, a young expatriate Italian philosopher, glosses these passages of Heidegger effectively:
"The solution, or perhaps the hope, that the German thinker sees is certainly not that of interrupting technical progress or of returning to some past golden age with little technical knowledge, but that of the possibility of another encounter with the phenomenon of technique, which, however, can only arise from questioning its essence”.
But let us continue Mario Ricciardi which approaches Heidegger's thought on technique in an original way and full of reflections related to the world in which we live and make our choices.
Heidegger's shelf
For Heidegger, the universal possession of technology means that the horizon available to human beings is not free but constrained, due to the concreteness imposed by technology. It is the technique that imposes itself on man, on his destiny, it it is “pro-vocation”, precedes and forces the path that man can and must undertake.
To express the ineluctable destiny that technology imposes on man, Heidegger uses the word Gestell (shelf), a simple and strong image at the same time, to indicate the necessary action, that of ordering and putting away on a shelf, available to all, experiences, objects, products. The keyword is "order". The shelf is a normative structure, it produces order, pigeons every experience and in doing so normalizes it (serializes it if we look at the process from an industrial and consumer point of view), decontextualizes it (according to the Fordist point of view) and makes the programmable experience, ready to be re-used in a perennial cycle, devoid of meaning.
Programming It's the ideal way to organize items on the shelf: does not invent but catalogs as in a database. Faced with this imposition, man can recover his freedom only if he is aware of the true character of technology, which is not a mere tool, and whose "setup" has nothing technical about it, but is part of the destiny of being .
As he had written Friedrich Hölderlin, it is in danger that what saves lurks; and Heidegger in this perspective, starting from the original sense of the word techne (art), rediscovers its affinity with poiesis: both, in ancient Greece, meant the production of the true and the beautiful. At that time, works of art and “technical” works were organic and unitary and preceded the alphabetic model.
The language machine
Through its mechanical capabilities and functionalities, the speech machine preconditions and constrains all possible uses of language. The language machine is, and increasingly will be, the means by which modern technology controls the potential and modes of language. Nevertheless it seems that man is still able to dominate the language machine. But it could also happen that the language machine takes over language itself in its domain and thus also dominates the essence of the human being.
Thus technology manipulates language transforming it into information, it reduces it to a support for data transmission. The practical action that derives from the use and diffusion of the technique reveals a totalizing impulse that reduces reality to a thing, a measurable and programmable object, necessarily operating in the concrete, perceived as the real world.
The expression spray machine it refers to the technical tool that directly affects language and can totally transform it. This form of domestication is revealed in its aspect of domination through the direct observation of a mechanical medium, the typewriter as it was permitted in 1957 to Heidegger. The typewriter can be seen as the mechanical prototype which already suggests a further step. It is no longer a gear that does its job to achieve a programmed goal. When technology is dedicated to communicating words, speaking languages, opening conversations between human beings active in society, its nature and function radically change.
The domain of the machine
Heidegger emphasizes two aspects: the matrix of totalizing programming tools that can be extended to the whole of society; the dominating function that this enhanced and enriched machine can exercise. A domain that concerns the action of possession of the "inhabited" territory and of society, typical of capitalism and even more of industrial capitalism. A domino that is not exercised only over the territory and over others; the machine itself is dominion, it contains within itself a self-programmed code that generates complete control even over the richest and most delicate tool of mankind: language.
Perhaps […] history and lore will slip silently into information retrieval systems to serve the inevitable planning needs of a cybernetically organized humanity. But the question is, whether even thinking will resolve itself into the business of information processing.
In the XNUMXs Heidegger could not foresee the effects of word processing, but he feared that the automation induced by the typewriter could influence the expressions of thought until it dominated thought itself. This threat is also reflected in the concept of Gebilde (reconstructed image): the term indicates the process induced by the nascent information technologies of progressive visual rendering (multimedia). The progress of information technologies makes the image of the world prevail and therefore the appearance, the representation on the reality and on the truth of the world, alienating all forms of experience.
Technique, vehicle of reified human experiences
The typewriter is still a mechanical object, produced by the mechanical industry. The letters appear on the paper when the gavel, pressed by the fingers of the hand, imprints the character through the prepared ribbon. There are no flows, no inputs, nor can the writer get out of the set mechanism. Heidegger understands technique, its essential character as a technology that can manipulate language, transforming it into information and reducing it to a mere vehicle for data transmission. This vision reveals a path of reduction of communication to a neutral and insignificant channel that carries only data, that is, elaborations and human experiences reified, reduced and objectified into data.
The spraacht machine was a small machine compared to the large computers, research centers or impressive laboratories of American or German industry, dedicated to computing information on cards or tape. The small machine fits into the offices of large companies, but it can also be a personal machine. A leap forward will do it in this direction, with a miracle of design style and technological capability, Olivetti with the invention of the Letter 22. This is a light and light machine, portable and easy to use.
