Before I begin – If you have other ideas of what constitutes a tool or technology please comment or schedule a dialogue with me.

Now to begin proper…  I have recently taking to call myself a systems poet. Most other people don’t know that I am talking about, but I know what I am talking about. Randomly the other day I described myself as a tool maker. What does that mean???

What are tools and what are the relationship between tools and technology?

I have written about this before, but I want to refine this…

So there are a few different ideas about tools and technologies

1a. Tools are an extension of the body, like a telescope is an extension of the eye

1b. Tools generate power which extends the body but something like a water wheel.

2a. Technologies are guard rails – I think of this in terms of the philosophy of nudging – and example is the fordist assembly line

2b. Technologies are practices to refine something  Here I think about things like kundalini is tech or yoga is tech. It is a way to focus or refine energy, but it is using your body as a tool. Someone once asked me what are you/me a tool for? 

I recently read Saving the Appearances by Owen Barfield. One of his ideas is that mathematical models like E =MC^2 grew out of making empirical observations. People making observations were just saving the appearances, just recording what they saw, they were not deducing anything. The phenomena  was primary, the data secondary.

This became flipped around when we started taking the data as primary. That is how we started creating models and then studying our models. You could even say science is now about studying models and using more data to figure out if it is correct or incorrect.

The models according to Barfield are the Idols, this is a form of idol worship. I am making no judgements, just observations. One of the great things about the 20th century is that our models became predictive and models started to drive our technologies instead of experiment driving technology. 

Since Napolean and the introduction of Logistics read Delanda’s War in the Age of Intelligent Machines we also have the idea of optimization.  Technology is no not just about models or equations, but about measurement and instrumentation (how well are we doing something, how accurate is a reading), and also about simulation.

We can think of Jungian active imagination as a technology, we can think about talk therapy as technology, we can think of games as technology.  As Marx says technology works on us as we work on technology, so technology is a part of conditioning. 

So to recap technology as extension, as refinement, and as prediction.

As I am thinking about developing technology and tools, more and more I am thinking in this cyborgian way, how do I want to be conditioned … today … right now. How do I want to be…

People say we are moving from an age of doing into an age of being… how do we think about technology as ontology instead of epistemology.