Narrative and Technology Ethics appears on the scene in a time of great disruption. Across the globe, societies are facing the crisis of the Covid19 pandemic, as well as its looming aftermath. The pandemic is not only a crisis of economics and politics, but also of technology. Indeed, technologies feature heavily in accounts of the virus’ spread and our responses to it. On the downside, technology has been a major factor in the rapid dispersion of the virus; through mobility networks that have been enabled by vast infrastructures and machines. On the upside, technology has enabled rapid response. Despite the sometimes-grave mistakes that have been made by countries in tackling the pandemic, there can be little doubt that without the technologies to quickly disseminate electronic messages, trace populations, and heal patients, death tolls would have been immensely higher. Compared to earlier global pandemics, such as the black death and the Spanish flue, the world has done a remarkable job in turning the tide. Technology has played a central role in the Covid19 stories and is likely to keep playing this role in the virus’ aftermath; as apps are being built to track people who get sick, new medical innovations are in the making, and also the understandable fear for technology might increase.
Thus, Covid19 shows how technologies play an important role in the stories that shape our understanding of where we are and where we are heading. Yet, stories concerning technology have been around for millennia. For instance, considering how much it appears in their myths; the ancient Greeks might well have loved technology. Yet, at the same time, they were utterly pessimistic about its consequences for human lives, or at the very least warned about the limits of what technology can do. In the Egyptian myth about the invention of writing, as told by Plato, the technology of writing is said to produce forgetfulness in the minds of readers. Prometheus gets punished when he brings the technology of fire to the mortals. Icarus gets artificial wings but the wax that holds his feathers together melts when he flies too high and he dies. And Pandora is also high tech: ‘made, not born’, she is an artificial woman or automaton, ordered by Zeus and made by Hephaestus. Disguising evil as beauty, her mission is to release suffering, death and disease upon humankind. Pandora’s myth reveals the normativity of technology in its historical context, for it is highly charged with the negative view of femininity in a patriarchical society.
Quite similar to the Greeks, we now ask: How to live well with technology? This question seems to be at the top of everyone’s mind. Whether one opens the newspaper, turns on the TV, or scrolls through Twitter, one is constantly confronted with the most recent breakthroughs in AI, the launch of yet another app, and the perils of the Chinese Social Credit System. The world of today is literally littered with stories about technology, about the manifold ways in which we think and express our thoughts about the giant artificial world we—together—have created. These stories range from those of today’s optimists, who rage about the possibilities for constructing the stone of (eternal) life that Medieval alchemists dreamt of; uploading one’s mind to the machine and living forever; to the stories of today’s pessimists, who see the same world as one that brings doom to mankind, through never-ending pollution and poisoning of the soul. Just a single peek at the news confirms this tendency. Smart technologies make our homes safer and more comfortable; cryptocurrencies hold the promise of “banking the poor”; and new medical technologies might cure most deadly diseases in the foreseeable future. At the same time, home assistant “Alexa” represents the relentless penetration of the household by giant tech companies; social media are fuelling worldwide spread of political hatred; and global industrial activities threaten to turn the earth into an inhabitable place,—threatening our very common home. As Bernard Stiegler (1998) rightfully observed, technology is similar to what the Ancient Greeks called a pharmakon: it is both the poison and the cure (or perhaps rather: neither the poison, nor the cure). At current, we are engaged in a global conversation, a web of stories, to answer the central question of how to live well with such a phenomenon.
But who are the protagonists and antagonists of these stories? Is this just about humans, for example about humans using technology or humans defending themselves against the bad effects of technology? If there is one thing that philosophers of technology have shown us, it is that it is not simply “us” against the “machines”. We cannot simply abandon technology and retreat to a pre-technological world; both because this “world” has never existed and because technology constitutes a condition of our existence. We are tool-making beings, in the words of Georg Simmel (1900). Exactly in this realisation, we find the key to seeing that we do not only do things with technologies, but together with them. Technologies are an essential part of the stories we tell, and they have a certain kind of agency; whether as “actants”, or as “mediating” artefacts. But why, one might ask, is it of any importance that technologies have agency in answering the question of how to live with them? Can we not simply use technologies in a better way? As long as we use the hammer to hammer, and not to hit each-other on the head, we should certainly be fine? However, the problem is that this description of human-technology relations does not quite fit the phenomena. In our experience and in what we do, technologies co-act our everyday choices and practices. In terms of a mantra that never seems to get old: “technology is not neutral” (but: what is it, instead?). Technologies persuade us, teach us, invite us, inhibit us, harm us, and thereby passively or actively contribute to the ethical choices we make and actions we engage in. Understanding this dynamic will help us make, use and govern technologies in ways that are conducive of the good life. Without understanding this dynamic, we seem to be lost.
This book departs from the idea that this dynamic is captured by the notions of technical practice and narrative. We start with the idea of technology-in-practice, or rather technical practice. If philosophy of technology has an object of study, it is not merely the actual thing, or artefact, but rather the thing-in-action. On this point, we agree with the latter-day giants of philosophy of technology like Don Ihde (1979), who argue that praxis should be the focal point of our study. For this reason, philosophy of technology should be “empirically informed”: it should study everyday practices to understand the role that technologies play in society. However, as we will see, we believe that the q...