Post #1992720
2026-03-30 07:53 UTC
@haverholm yeah I have a memory of McLuhan writing something like that too. Heidegger and Haraway both suggested this too, with slight nuance on how they meant it.
You could also take another definition of technology as harbinger of violence, and again books could qualify (much as I love them, they serve this purpose too).
This tangling of culture and technology in a book is an interesting point though. An individual book might be a part of culture, and books might be a technology?
Replies (1)
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@haverholm@radikal.social 2026-03-30 08:23
@ephemeral It's disconcerting to accept that technologies are latently violent, but... being invented and used by people, it only makes sense. On culture or technology — ¿por qué no los dos? 🙂 Consider how written language → printing → internet provides one (simplified) progression of cultural technologies that drastically changed the possible audience and the way they engage with/read text? I first wrote "consume text", but the commercial connotations may only dig this hole deeper yet…