I've wondered this before as well, but I honestly forgot what my train of thought was when trying to cast ethics as a technology – reviewing my Aristotle and such, I am reminded that this idea doesn't really make sense; at least not in the history of occidental thought.
"Techne" (i.e. instrumentalized technology) aims at production (poiesis). The goal is to create an external product, like a house or a statue. Ethics aims at action (praxis). The goal however (in ancient Western philosophy) is living well (eudaimonia), where the action itself is the end. Teche-qua-teche cannot be its own end.
In techne, value resides entirely in the finished object. A beautifully crafted chair is good, even if the carpenter who made it is a terrible person. In ethics, value resides in the agent's character. An action is only truly virtuous if the person does it knowingly, deliberately, and from a stable moral character. Kant doesn't care if virtue is done anonymous or not as long as it comes from conscientious "inner" duty, whereas Jesus does insist that the left hand should not know what the right is doing, come ethical actions (Matthew 6:3-4).
So, techne relies on a set of universal rules or manual techniques that can be taught systematically. Ethics relies on phronesis (practical wisdom), which cannot be reduced to a simple rulebook or "medium". It requires judging each unique life situation case by case and having one's "skin in the game of life" which techne (as a modality) cannot abide by.
That all said, I do want to remember what I was originally thinking! Maybe it was more along these lines: if you were a higher-dimensional being and wanted to impart an ecological technology to unruly mortals (i.e. a system to maintain the Earth) who couldn't possibly understand all the variables, then might that techne takes the form of ethics (e.g. Ten Commandments?) Like, maybe our God-given ethics are an ecological technology? Alas, I digress.
Thanks for referencing, Sam! Ethical systems are certainly among media affordances.
I would add two considerations.
1. Media effects are not linear; they are compounding. The waves of effects from newer media collide with the effects of older media. Since all cultures have their own pace and history of media adoption, each nation receives its own unique blend of compunding media effects.
That is how the US differs from Canada despite both being in the era of AI: there was no colonial bourgeois revolution in Canada driven by print literacy and newspapers, and therefore the printed word has been less prominent in Canada, with a multitude of consequences, including very weak newspapers and public debate.
2. Communication technologies, from writing to social media, have reversed the focus on the message into a focus on the user. Writing was reader-blind and focused on content delivery (to whoever could read); social media are user-centric and nearly content-blind. Everything between writing and social media represented this progression: from a focus on content to a focus on the user. Among the other ethical consequences, this is how identity politics emerged in the era of television and reached its extremes in the era of social media.
The entire evolution of media has been a history-long identity training of humankind, and this has been a major factor in shaping ethical systems.
Keep in mind that newer forms of communication don't fully supersede older forms. At some level, people need to be able to spend time in person. Otherwise there's no procreation.
Exactly. Tech changed the culture. Trump was birthed from that. Not literally but psychologically. We created Trump; we built our very own humanoid cultural Frankenstein.
Agree with the gist of this. It bears saying efficiency might be the growling abyss in all our mediums. There is the acid in our stomachs to outrun by making good before we wake up and realize we left our crib. Like with telephones, nothing makes me angrier than to say I love you on the phone, makes me feel like a Snidely Whiplash, but it is like in the command line of the message the Wish you were here. Internet when used on the phone seems to be teleologically under the telgraphic constraints of the old phones. Maybe communicating the left hand of the same wishyouwere here: like in the psychology of Alfred Teach showing how alive you are in an energetic tease, Teach says is our baseline of desire. Which obviously can be accomplished as in a game efficiently in infinite variety.
I think you are making a very good point, i.e., form is more important than content.
But I would add that beautiful things are harder to make than ugly things. And then you have to figure out what's beautiful and what's ugly. The idea of quality, refinement maybe, comes into it.
I've wondered this before as well, but I honestly forgot what my train of thought was when trying to cast ethics as a technology – reviewing my Aristotle and such, I am reminded that this idea doesn't really make sense; at least not in the history of occidental thought.
"Techne" (i.e. instrumentalized technology) aims at production (poiesis). The goal is to create an external product, like a house or a statue. Ethics aims at action (praxis). The goal however (in ancient Western philosophy) is living well (eudaimonia), where the action itself is the end. Teche-qua-teche cannot be its own end.
In techne, value resides entirely in the finished object. A beautifully crafted chair is good, even if the carpenter who made it is a terrible person. In ethics, value resides in the agent's character. An action is only truly virtuous if the person does it knowingly, deliberately, and from a stable moral character. Kant doesn't care if virtue is done anonymous or not as long as it comes from conscientious "inner" duty, whereas Jesus does insist that the left hand should not know what the right is doing, come ethical actions (Matthew 6:3-4).
So, techne relies on a set of universal rules or manual techniques that can be taught systematically. Ethics relies on phronesis (practical wisdom), which cannot be reduced to a simple rulebook or "medium". It requires judging each unique life situation case by case and having one's "skin in the game of life" which techne (as a modality) cannot abide by.
That all said, I do want to remember what I was originally thinking! Maybe it was more along these lines: if you were a higher-dimensional being and wanted to impart an ecological technology to unruly mortals (i.e. a system to maintain the Earth) who couldn't possibly understand all the variables, then might that techne takes the form of ethics (e.g. Ten Commandments?) Like, maybe our God-given ethics are an ecological technology? Alas, I digress.
Thanks for referencing, Sam! Ethical systems are certainly among media affordances.
I would add two considerations.
1. Media effects are not linear; they are compounding. The waves of effects from newer media collide with the effects of older media. Since all cultures have their own pace and history of media adoption, each nation receives its own unique blend of compunding media effects.
That is how the US differs from Canada despite both being in the era of AI: there was no colonial bourgeois revolution in Canada driven by print literacy and newspapers, and therefore the printed word has been less prominent in Canada, with a multitude of consequences, including very weak newspapers and public debate.
2. Communication technologies, from writing to social media, have reversed the focus on the message into a focus on the user. Writing was reader-blind and focused on content delivery (to whoever could read); social media are user-centric and nearly content-blind. Everything between writing and social media represented this progression: from a focus on content to a focus on the user. Among the other ethical consequences, this is how identity politics emerged in the era of television and reached its extremes in the era of social media.
The entire evolution of media has been a history-long identity training of humankind, and this has been a major factor in shaping ethical systems.
(Here is the chapter from The Digital Reversal about it: "The reversal of identity into credentials: the fallout of media targeting" - https://www.andreymir.com/p/the-reversal-of-identity-into-credentials)
Keep in mind that newer forms of communication don't fully supersede older forms. At some level, people need to be able to spend time in person. Otherwise there's no procreation.
Exactly. Tech changed the culture. Trump was birthed from that. Not literally but psychologically. We created Trump; we built our very own humanoid cultural Frankenstein.
Agree with the gist of this. It bears saying efficiency might be the growling abyss in all our mediums. There is the acid in our stomachs to outrun by making good before we wake up and realize we left our crib. Like with telephones, nothing makes me angrier than to say I love you on the phone, makes me feel like a Snidely Whiplash, but it is like in the command line of the message the Wish you were here. Internet when used on the phone seems to be teleologically under the telgraphic constraints of the old phones. Maybe communicating the left hand of the same wishyouwere here: like in the psychology of Alfred Teach showing how alive you are in an energetic tease, Teach says is our baseline of desire. Which obviously can be accomplished as in a game efficiently in infinite variety.
I think you are making a very good point, i.e., form is more important than content.
But I would add that beautiful things are harder to make than ugly things. And then you have to figure out what's beautiful and what's ugly. The idea of quality, refinement maybe, comes into it.