Humans are neither autonomous (as in 'closed systems'), nor is any technology
'completely external' to any particular human if you you consider the nature of
reality as a completely connected and continuous field of flows.
Humans are affective of and at the effect of both proximal and distal flows that
technology is comprised of. Technology, fundamentally, is merely an applied
protocol influencing the flow of those energies that we are fully embedded
within (an that we are of).
John
On 10/2/23 4:37 AM, Gary Hall via nettime-l wrote:
I wonder, doesn't that rather raise the question of whether humans are
themselves autonomous?
Is there is an original, pre-existing, human subject that then comes into
contact with a technology that is completely external and foreign to it, and is
merely used as a tool by autonomous humans for instrumental, utilitarian purposes?
Or is the human born out of - and hence shaped by - its relation to technology
(among other things)? Here, technology is what makes the human possible in the
first place, language being the most obvious example. For many anthropologists,
what we understand as the human emerged with the use of tools. Without these
tools, and without language especially, the ability of humans to communicate and
engage in the kind of complex thinking that makes them 'human' would be
significantly limited.
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