There is something about the readings that was interesting, but also slightly bothered me. Heidegger discusses the idea that “everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it” (1). In a very significant way, most of the readings today were about that chain…about the way in which we cannot really break away from the power and influence that technology has on us. This came in the form of actual, physical representations of chains, as in the story of “Harrison Bergeron,” where all people are chained by technology to be equal, but only by bringing the superior down, not by bringing the lowly up, but it also comes in the method of showing how we really are chained to the technologies around us. “I, Pencil,” while discussing the idea that nobody knows how to make…well…you know…almost anything, manages to demonstrate the ways in which technologies govern us. This goes beyond the physical representations of tools, but to the broader concepts of civilization. Civilization, under this conception, is a technology for organizing us in such a way that nobody really has control over their own lives, the ability to truly walk away from the system.

In other words…we are the technology.

We are the gears and the cogs that put us into service to a much larger system, one that can never, or at least almost never, care about any particular individual. It’s kinda scary really…and it really gives an interesting perspective to start a class about posthumanism on. Yes, technology does shape our lives. We are all changed by even the technologies today that seem relatively simple (at least in comparison)…”The Telephone” being an excellent example. But we have never really even lived outside this conception of technology. The group mentality, working together, is a systematic technology that subsumes the individual, and (though obviously I am no real expert on the distant past) I’m sure it’s one that we’ve put to use in hunting, gathering, and living, for almost as long as we have been human, and quite likely even before, when we were…um, prehuman? So which technological advance makes us posthuman then? When did it happen? How did we get to a point where suddenly we considered technology to have changed us to being beyond human? Is it the first time that the cogs couldn’t understand the larger system with relative ease…and therefore be in some kind of control of it? That seems possible, even likely to me, but again, it means we’ve been posthuman for a very, very long time then. Because the machines that govern us (and lets fully admit it, our iphones, laptops, and tablets very much govern us today) are only the latest incarnations of how technology has chosen roles for individuals, rather than individuals choosing roles for themselves. It seems we are likely to be a self-perpetuating system, where individuals seem to believe they have freedom, but where none of us really knows how to create much.

And to leap into my own field of study…this is perhaps a reason children are some of the most free of us (though probably less so as technology enters their lives earlier and earlier), because while controlled by a number of outside factors, they are still the most likely to attempt to create something with the basic building blocks around us. A stick, some mud…these are still interesting to them, and therefore still freeing. “I, Pencil” talks about wonder…and the way in which it is lost to us. I think this is part of being a cog…of not understanding what you create. The less we’re interested in how the technology works, how it is made, how to make it…the less we can even be involved in the wonder of these amazing technologies around us.

Scary much?