What is Technology
Technology Didn't Start With Electricity — It Started With a Stick
The word 'technology' is so stretched by modern usage that it has quietly stopped meaning anything at all.
The Idea
Ask someone what technology is and they'll gesture vaguely at screens, servers, or silicon. But this instinct to equate technology with electronics is historically shallow and philosophically confused. The philosopher of technology Albert Borgmann argued that technology is better understood as any systematic means of achieving an end — which means a clay pot, a plough, and a written alphabet are as much technology as a microprocessor. Martin Heidegger went further, suggesting that technology isn't primarily a collection of tools but a way of revealing the world — a mode of perceiving and relating to reality. When you look at a forest and see 'timber resources,' you are already inside a technological frame of mind, even without a chainsaw in your hand. What makes this more than a semantic game is the insight it unlocks: every technology embeds a set of values and assumptions. A hammer assumes there are nails. A calendar assumes time should be divided and owned. An algorithm assumes that human preferences can be modelled and predicted. The philosopher Langdon Winner made this explicit with the phrase 'artifacts have politics' — the design of a thing is never neutral, it always encodes choices about who benefits, who controls, and what kind of life is worth living. Technology, then, is not a category of objects. It is a relationship between humans and the world, mediated by made things — and the made things always talk back.
In the World
In the 1930s, urban planner Robert Moses built a series of highway overpasses on Long Island, New York, at a very specific height: too low for buses to pass beneath them. The beaches they led to — Jones Beach, in particular — were effectively off-limits to anyone who couldn't afford a private car, which in that era disproportionately meant Black and lower-income residents. Moses never wrote a discriminatory policy. He didn't need to. He encoded exclusion into concrete. This is Langdon Winner's argument made literal. The overpass is not a neutral structure doing a neutral job. It is a political artifact, a decision frozen into infrastructure. And once built, it shapes behaviour and access for decades — long after the intentions of the builder are forgotten, long after anyone is even asking why the buses don't go to the beach. The lesson isn't that Moses was uniquely sinister (though scholars debate how conscious his choices were). The lesson is structural: every designed object reflects the priorities, blindspots, and power dynamics of the moment it was created. Social media feeds optimised for engagement, office buildings designed without adequate nursing rooms, cities planned around car ownership — these aren't failures of technology. They are technology working exactly as designed, by people who didn't think, or didn't care, to design otherwise. When you understand this, you start looking at the built world differently — not as a neutral backdrop to human life, but as an argument about how human life should be arranged.
Why It Matters
This reframe has immediate practical weight. When we treat technology as merely a category of gadgets, we become passive recipients of it — we consume or resist devices, but we don't interrogate the assumptions baked into them. When we understand technology as a relationship that encodes values, we become more capable critics and more thoughtful participants. It changes how you read a news story about an algorithm that produces biased hiring decisions. It's not a malfunction — it's the values of its training data, made automatic and scalable. It changes how you evaluate a new productivity tool — not just 'does this save me time' but 'what kind of work, and what kind of worker, does this silently assume I should be?' It also quietly rehabilitates older technologies from condescension. The printed book, the pencil, the public library — these are not primitive precursors to something better. They are arguments about knowledge, access, and attention that remain worth taking seriously on their own terms. Thinking clearly about what technology actually is turns out to be the first step in thinking clearly about which technologies we want, and why.
A Question to Ponder
What is one technology you use daily that you have never questioned — and what values or assumptions might it be quietly encoding?
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