‘Barbarism? Yes, Indeed’: A Barbaric Theorizing of Technology

This essay is a response to the situatedness of prominent technological visions in specific epistemic communities, their potential to spread across societies, and a historical colonial trend of western ideologies influencing and shaping technology development in non-western contexts. This essay thereby aims to outline different norms and strategies that Technology Assessment can adopt in the identification and pursuit of technological visions in ways that do not enact a neo-colonial epistemic violence. In particular, this essay draws on post-colonial literature from subaltern studies to identify how technological visions enact an epistemic violence and then develop two norms namely, i) maintenance of vision heterogeneity and ii) enabling local construction of technological visions. These norms serve as high-level guidelines that can help TA practices in the operationalization of technological visions. Lastly, this essay suggests possible strategies that can be constructed based on these two norms in the context of particular technologies and their corresponding visions.

Affiliates, distant individuals, capitalism, science and technology, now merged as if they were a single instance, consolidate their supremacy on contemporary society, determining its course with the same brazenness and impersonality of an invisible hand. Modern barbarism or barbarism generated within the so-called civilized societies characterized by the use of technical modern means (industrialization of murder, mass extermination thanks to cutting edge scientific technologies), the impersonality of the massacre (whole populations - men and women, children and elderly - are "eliminated" with the lowest personal contact as possible between the decision maker and victims), the bureaucratic, administrative, effective, planned, "rational" management (in instrumental terms) of barbaric acts and the use of legitimating ideology of the modern type: biological, hygienic, scientific.

Thresholds (2019) (47): 17–27., 2019

In this text, I will try to convince you of the vanity of critique. The argument is simple: there is no world without war, and neoliberal capitalism is a weaponized economy. This is a version of the larger argument that claims resistance is futile. You will be commodified. The first section will theorize ‘technology’ as consisting in the integration of a series of ‘tests,’ which is nothing but ‘nature in disguise.’ The second section provides a theory of ‘weaponization’ as the purposeful utilization of ‘failure’ qua ‘destruction.’ It will be shown how ‘weaponization’ is living within technology. Consequentially, there is no technology without arms. We will argue for the metaphysical inevitability of war. The third and last section will show how, along these lines, neoliberal capitalism, understood on a global scale, is a weapon in the sense defined. Consequentially, we are at war—globally and tacitly. And as it stands, no force can stop it. It will be much more convenient to acquiesce to defeat than to waste time and energy in critique and resistance. Welcome to the future of compliance.

Synesis, 4, 2013

It goes without saying that the change we experience today, which is fuelled by a series of new technologies, differs from other profound changes that have defined our culture in the past. The current change affects our everyday lives, but the new tools it offers us can be seen as an extension of our senses, of our various modes of communication and, to a certain extent, of our brains (since the question about whether one regards machines as extensions of living organisms or living organisms as complex machines seems to be a topic of exploration as well). Nowadays, the proliferation of the fields of knowledge, the often vague distinction between art, technology and science, and the "immaterial" form of the new tech-nologies compel us to widen the field of our traditional research disciplines, and most crucially the field of ethics. The debate around the morality of technology has given rise to special moral categories -regarding for example the issues of responsibility, safety and risk -which had not been as important in premodern moral philosophy.

The idea of this paper is to present the current state of violence which is the Brazilian society in the XXI century. Introducing the power of influence of the authorities that rekindles the return of dictatorship and technological development that opened previously unimagined doors allowing for the first time in human history the production and access to knowledge for good and for bad, larger than the last five thousand (5,000) years. In this scenario we find ourselves in between savagery and technology, through a literature review and qualitative research beyond discourse analysis (even minimized), I tried to understand the suffering experienced today by our society, comparing them to Stanley experiments Milgram, where individuals tend to obey the authorities, even if they contradict the individual common sense and Philip Zimbardo, where good people are induced or seduced to take violent actions. ABSTRACT: The idea of this essay is to present the current period of violence that Brazilian society finds itself in, even now in the 21st century. Presenting the power to influence held by authorities that are re-igniting the dictatorship's return and the technological development that has opened doors that were never even imaginable before, allowing, for the first time in human history, for types of knowledge production and an access to knowledge for both good and for evil that is greater than in the last five thousand years. Faced with this scenario somewhere between barbarity and technology, and through a literature review and a qualitative research through a speech analysis (even minimized), I tried to understand the suffering experienced by our society today, comparing it to Stanley Milgram's experiments, where individuals tend to obey authorities even if it goes against their individual judgment, and Philip Zimbardo's experiments where good people are induced and seduced into taking violent attitudes.

Anthropological Measurements of Philosophical Research, 2022

Purpose. To substantiate the definition of technics as the attributive characteristics of a human being and the necessity of its orientation towards human flourishing in the context of new anthropological models of the 21st century. Theoretical basis. Correlation between technics, technology and the human essence is examined. The role of technics is traced at different historical stages of human development. Negative and positive effects of digital technology development upon a contemporary human being is analysed in the light of new anthropological models: homo technologicus, homo digitalis and homo eudaimonicus. The content of a new worldview-value paradigm of defining goals of technology is outlined. Originality. Transformation of the role of technics correlates with value and worldview shifts in person's understanding of his/her purpose in both natural and social worlds. Nowadays, philosophical analysis of anthropological dimension of technics and technology opens a horizon for seeking effective solutions in the face of the contemporary challenges and anti-utopian threats by means of focusing on the fact that, indeed, technological development is subordinate to the humanist goal that is flourishing, wellbeing and comprehensive development of a human being. Conclusions. The essence of technology reveals not through its functional but anthropogenic definitions in a sense of a source of institutionalization and in a sense of a source of realization of a human way of self-identification and self-objectification of human subjectivity. Technics/technology is the attributive characteristics of human essence and being: a human being is as much human as much he/she is a creator of technics. The purpose of technics is not to master the nature and to transform the world; technics is, above all, a tool of human self-improvement and self-creation through broadening the horizon of human capacities. The analysis of new modern anthropological models shows that it is the orientation of technology/technology towards human flourishing that is, on the one hand, a response to the existential demands of modern man, and on the other hand, a way of preventing future threats related to technological development.

Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, 2011

As a scientist Michael Polanyi made significant advances in chemistry and economics. From that deep hands-on experience he derived a powerful critique of prevailing ideas of knowledge and the proper role of science. He demonstrated that disregarding or eliminating the personal embodiment of knowing in the tacit dimension in order to distill purely explicit knowledge results in knowledge that is misleadingly incomplete-"absurd". His critique can be extended by applying it to science's practical application: technology.

tasa.org.au

This paper considers those things that Zygmunt Bauman called "modernity's extreme spirit": genocide, state terror and the like. They are made possible by modern techniques of organization and production, namely bureaucracy and industry, and as the outcomes of purposive collective action they are, at least in principle, sociologically explainable. To say that they can be explained is not the same thing as saying that they have been explained. I argue that sociologists have yet to adequately engage with these issues, and that the hesitance stems from a failure to find both an appropriate language and a fitting conceptual structure. One suggested way forward is to factor technology fully into our analyses and to utilize the language of Science Technology Society studies. Several methodological principles will be suggested.