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To say the trigger wants to be pulled is not to say only that the trigger “was made for” pulling. It is not even to say that the trigger “affords” pulling. It is to say that the trigger may be so culturally meaningful as to act upon us in powerful ways (as indeed we see with guns habitually).
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The image of hands grasping, texting, and swiping draws our attention to the people at other end of the technologies that shape our lives.
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Noteworthy reads from the last week.
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Humility, laziness, true confessions, and The Karate Kid—an interview with Alan Jacobs on his 79 Theses for Disputation.
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What if we taught commentary instead of expression, not just for beginning writers, but right on through university and the PhD?
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Once you start to think of technologies as having desires of their own you are well on the way to the Borg Complex: we all instinctively understand that it is precisely because tools don’t want anything that they cannot be reasoned with or argued with. And we can become easily intimidated by the sheer scale of technological production in our era. Eventually we can end up talking even about what algorithms do as though algorithms aren’t written by humans.