In his book Tools for Conviviality (1975), Ivan Illich calls for human self-limitation in technology development. His aim is neither environmental protection nor the prevention of unforeseen side-effects of technology development, but the comprehensibility of technologies’ operating principles for the user. For if the construction or repairing of tools requires expert knowledge inaccessible to the public, this necessarily entails social imbalances in power. In a similar manner, Bernard Stiegler conceives the delegation of know-how to technological systems as a kind of proletarianization that ultimately may result in a loss of savoir-vivre. Without sweepingly rejecting the division of labour, automation or specialized knowledge, practices of commoning respond to such diagnoses: free software like GNU/Linux or open hardware largely succeed in unlinking the expert knowledge that advanced computing doubtlessly requires from problematic power effects. From this perspective, proprietary algorithms are problematic, as their lack of transparency prevents conviviality. This also holds for the practices of data aggregation and extraction which steadily increase the information gap between platform providers and users. An even more fundamental problem is posed by so-called “self-learning”, i.e., recursively adapting, algorithms: it is not clear how and to what extent the knowledge and instructions generated by “artificial intelligence” can be traced and reconstructed by human insight. Thus, we are confronted with a situation of potentially non-recoverable proletarianization and non-conviviality that exposes a renewed urgency of Illich’s considerations concerning technological self-limitation.
This paper situates Günther Anders’s diagnosis of a shift in the modes of human self-production from hermeneutic and educational practices to techno-scientific interventions in the broader context of observations concerning posthumanism and biopolitics (e.g. Peter Sloterdijk, Giorgio Agamben). It proposes to reframe the problem of human self-production within the philosophy of media and traces a common anti-hermeneutic trajectory to which both technoscientific transhumanism and certain strands of posthumanism belong, insofar as they are based on an ontology that exclusively considers causally effective agency. With Anders and Martin Heidegger it is argued that such a focus on agency neglects the dimension of meaning that irreducibly guides technoscientific interventions. The paper claims that, with regard to the escalating dynamics both of human enhancement and of the Anthropocene, neither a truly critical theoretical stance nor a practical subversion is possible without taking the horizons of meaning into account that drive these dynamics. The last section sketches an outline of the complex interrelations of humans, technologies and meaning that cannot be mapped in terms of causally effective agency.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.