Image borrowed from Theologische Fakultät, Universität Rostock
Martin Heidegger wrote the following introductory lines to establish the scope and approach of his 1954 essay The Question Concerning Technology:
We shall be questioning concerning technology, and in so doing we should like to prepare a free relationship to it. The relationship will be free if it opens our human existence to the essence of technology …
Technology is not equivalent to the essence of technology. When we are seeking the essence of “tree,” we have to become aware that That which pervades every tree, as tree, is not itself a tree that can be encountered among all the other trees.
Likewise, the essence of technology is by no means any thing technological. Thus we shall never experience our relation ship to the essence of technology so long as we merely conceive and push forward the technological, put up with it, or evade it.
What struck me most was the next paragraph:
Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as some thing neutral; for this conception of it, to which today we particularly like to do homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology.
The concept of neutral technology (it’s what you do with it that counts) is surely as prevalent today as it was when Heidegger wrote – at least among those who develop tech.
Subtle Engine 