We’ve discussed related themes before in destruction-and-creation-are-path-dependent which is a specific outcome of this though.

In Letters to a Young Technologist, Saffron Huang argues that technology is a path to an end, an instrument and that it is not neutral. By it’s very existence, technology makes a certain path easier than other paths, it preferentially make certain types of behaviour better.

Making technology involves an ongoing attempt to bring the world closer to the way one wishes it to be. The technologist actively participates in determining what that wish is, rather than having clearly defined problems handed to them.

So in a sense, the very act of technology expresses the ideology of the technologist, thus making it impossible for the technology itself to be neutral.

This is in stark contrast to science, in science we seek to remove the agency of the scientist to observe objective truth, technologists use objective truth to give agency to themselves.

“Science concerns itself with what is, whereas technology concerns itself with what is to be” - Henryk Skolimowski, 1966

Viewing a technology as a purely neutral object is ignoring the human intention designed into it, the meaning that humans give to the technology we interact with, and the incredible agency involved in a technologist’s work.

This line of argument does raise a few questions. Namely, should the technologist solely have this agency given the scope of the impact of modern technology? Does making a certain path lower resistance necessarily imply that it is routing away from other paths, many technologies involve making paths where none existed previously at all?