The Problem of Technology and the Mechanization of the Flesh

Part One: Technology as Ontology 

You can see technology as a society’s stock of tools and machines, which are made to serve particular purposes. Thus although you can judge the goodness or badness of the purposes, the tools themselves are neutral. “It is not a rifle that kills but a hard heart.” A rifle is a tool for killing but there are times when killing is justified or even necessary (e.g. hunting game to survive, defense of family), and times when killing is evil. Still, the purpose belongs to the tool, and not all purposes are equal. To that extent at least, not all technology is equal. The few varieties of tomatoes available in supermarkets are connected to their ability to be harvested by a certain kind of machine, which itself was invented to replace dependence on human workers: that machine is not a neutral tool but part of capitalist rationality. The Amish – to their credit – would have no use for it. Technology is always embedded in economic-social-power arrangements, supporting or undermining these. The Internet left in the university world would function differently than it does in corporate capitalism, though the basic technological idea is the same. Capitalism develops the complex of Internet technologies in radically different ways than would a non-profit university Internet. Again, the Amish have no use for it at all. Technology is an interplay of power, purpose, economics, and social form.

   A mechanical clock may seem like a neutral device for measuring time, but it imposes its own logic and purpose on how we experience and structure life. The purpose of a clock is to divide time into uniform, measurable units—hours, minutes, and seconds—transforming our subjective experience of time into a quantifiable resource. This shift is far from innocuous. By breaking time into discrete, measurable parts, the clock subtly changes how humans perceive and engage with the world:

1.    Loss of Organic Rhythms: Before clocks became ubiquitous, human life was structured around natural rhythms—sunrise, sunset, the seasons. The clock replaces these organic rhythms with mechanical regularity, detaching us from the natural flow of time.

2.    Efficiency Over Wholeness: The clock’s division of time encourages a mindset focused on efficiency and productivity, where time becomes a commodity to be used, saved, or wasted. This can fragment our activities and relationships, reducing the sense of wholeness or integrity in how we live.

3.    Dehumanizing Labor: In workplaces, the clock regulates activities into shifts and breaks, turning work into a set of timed tasks. Workers themselves may start to be seen not as whole persons but as units of labor measured in "man-hours."

In essence, the clock shapes how humans experience life by treating time not as a holistic continuum, but as a heap of interchangeable moments, much like the computer’s treatment of information. It has a purpose—measuring and dividing time—that influences not only what we do with it but also how we think about time, ourselves, and the world.

   The clock conditions us to think of time as a series of interchangeable units. This affects how we structure our lives—prioritizing schedules and productivity over the organic flow of life. Similarly, the photo conditions us to see representations (images) as interchangeable with reality, making it easier to forget the uniqueness and immediacy of the original experience. When you view a computer-produced digital photo, your perception of the image as a whole is indeed intact. You see the sunset, not the pixels or binary code. However, the critique is about the conditions that made the digital photo possible and how those conditions influence your experience, replacing or colonizing the original experience. The richness of the sunset as a lived, embodied experience (its warmth, its fleeting quality, its context in your life) is reduced to visual data. A computer captures only what it can quantify—not the subjective, emotional, or relational dimensions of the moment. The digital photo can be copied, resized, and edited endlessly. This undermines its singularity. Unlike a painting or a physical photograph, it no longer exists as a unique object tied to a specific time and place. The sunset has been reduced to parts (pixels, data points), which the computer assembles into an image. While you perceive the whole, the underlying process reflects a fragmented view of reality. The computer had to transform the sunset into data—discrete, measurable packets of information. This transformation emphasizes what can be measured and replicated over what is inherently unique or unquantifiable. The sunset itself, in reality, is a singular, unrepeatable event. The digital image, however, is a representation, created through a process that has prioritized its technical replicability over its uniqueness. [Plato’s allegory of the cave!]

   In all these cases, the mechanistic process doesn’t just transform the specific object (time or the sunset); it subtly changes how we think about time itself or experience itself. Time becomes something to measure and control, rather than something to live through or celebrate as part of Creation. The world becomes a collection of data points to manipulate, rather than a mystery to encounter as a whole. Both examples illustrate the same underlying colonization of the spirit: that technological systems tend to impose their own logic of fragmentation and mechanization onto our understanding of the world, subtly reshaping – or re-wiring – how we live and think.

     The action of  “processing information” is always the purpose of the computer itself. It is thus one that every user necessarily makes his own, even if implicitly, by the very act of using the computer. You may use the computer for evangelization or for selling porn. You may be trying to convey ideas, and not reduce them to bits of machinery. Nonetheless, by turning on the computer, you are just so far accepting the purpose of the computer itself. To achieve your purpose, you have got to let the computer achieve its purpose of processing information.

. . .

    It is also located in a society’s scientific, engineering, and economic infrastructure. Technology presupposes all of these. The form technology takes in capitalism is a function of a high level of scientific knowledge and engineering know-how put mostly in the service of corporate pecuniary interests. The rise of technology is one with the rise of science and capitalist industrialism.

Within this system the military power of a country is a function importantly of technology such that countries that are not part of this system would not be in a position to defend itself against an aggressor that was (all things being equal).

But modern technology can also be seen as the physical embodiment of a worldview, a way of seeing the earth (nature) and the human world, a was of seeing the human relationship to nature, to other human beings, to the past and future (i.e. to time), and even to God — as Marx, Mumford, Heidegger, and others have seen it despite differing philosophies. Technology is the filter, or lens through which those of us condemned to live in capitalism – whether in the liberal or autocratic-fascist versions – experience and conceptualize the very being of things. Technology is not just a metaphor for our take on reality but the most literal expression of it: that is, of the “modern project,” the project of mastering nature ostensibly to better the lot of Man but really to increase the power of the masters of technology (the corporation and the state) over man.  Technology is another name for the enterprise of becoming “masters and possessors of nature,” as Descartes put it. But as C. S. Lewis put in The Abolition of Man (a necessary read): “What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.”

      If nature is amoral, an indifferent, meaningless collection of stuff – as it is seen through the lens of technology – better, the regime of Technology-Science-Capitalism (one complex) – then there is no such thing as violating nature; there is just the raw transformation of the raw material of the world. If human making is unbounded by any pre-given moral order written into the heart of nature, then anything goes. The results are clear to see. I don’t just mean the Earth has been tormented to its limits but also our humanity. This is the fruit of the ontology and its corresponding epistemology of Technology-Science-Capitalism.

   Many of us worry about the Internet or biotech but our worries are often blunted by the bland assurance that the problem with technology isn’t technology itself but how we choose to use it. But this faith in the neutrality of technology expresses the essence of technology itself – the fundamentalist conviction that nature herself sets no limits to what we should do. What can be done is done as long as some corporation profits. Only at the extreme fringes where humanity is cancelled does the State try to impose limits (e.g. cloning) though increasingly that attempt seems like a relic from a pre-modern culture.  The belief that technology is a set of neutral instruments, like technology itself, is one with the conviction that there is no moral order in physical nature, just brute matter whose only meaning we put into it through our transformative making and doing. To say “technology is neutral” is to say “making, as making, is amoral, but you can add morality to making – if you wish.” Thus the human will is seen as the only source of moral value in the universe; technology is the instrument of this radical freedom.

     Technology becomes what Marx called a “form of social consciousness” that determines our largely subconscious “common sense.”

1.    The technological order cannot be changed or qualitatively altered. To refuse the fruits of technological “progress” is a form of madness or delusion.

2.    The existing technological order is morally good. Technology makes life qualitatively better. The past has nothing to teach us.

3.    What does not comply with the technological order is blameworthy. We can disagree about all kinds of issues as long as we don’t call into question the mainframe of Technology-Science-Capitalism (in its corporate form).

4.    What promotes this order is praiseworthy. People who serve it get Noble prizes – and lucrative jobs and social prestige.

5.    Whatever rank individuals hold in this order represents their intrinsic worth. Billionaires, scientists, engineers, etc. are worth more than the family farmer or traditional craftsman.

6.    The technological order represents the common good. To all appearances we all consent to it – or rather, it is so deeply ingrained in us we take it for granted, never occurs to us to question it.

7.    Corporations represent the interests of society as a whole. They are engines of employment and technological development.

8.    Capital (the power of those who control it to command labor and nature) is represented as a self-moving power that “creates jobs,” “brings prosperity,” etc.  

9.    Ultimate social agency rests in a non-human entity. Thus instead of “fate” or “divine plan” we get “technological progress” as the agency of history.

If you in a difficult rebellion manage to think outside this… not box but cage, you will be considered unhinged and ignored in liberal democracies; perhaps imprisoned or killed in the capitalist autocracies.  

   This molding of consciousness goes deep. The word “technology” sums up the historical shift from a concern with work according to nature and human nature – work that can intelligibly be a vocation –  to the taken-for-granted attitude that there is no nature, no reality to conform to in the first place. It is shorthand for the shift from the ideal of the craftsman to the ideal of the technician. And since this shift has affected how we make what we make, the technological mentality behind the shift is bound to be “wired” into our gadgetry itself.  Most of us cannot find meaning in work or a community of workers or in making well what needs to be made but only in the stuff (little of which you really need) you can buy with the money you make, if indeed you are lucky enough to make any money. It is a poor trade. Trading the real world for a digital Cave (referring to Plato’s allegory).