Is my iPhone making me (more) of a dick? Are reddit and Facebook slowly making you hate Southerners? I think we all realize that technology affects our day-to-day lives, but I don’t think most people (including myself) have a good idea of how it changes our values in the long-term. Many people in the technology industry (including Steve Jobs) claim to just be making tools and absolving themselves of their consequences. [1] However, most tools have implied value systems and using them has moral and cultural implications. And implications for us as individuals.

Technology, at its core, is anything that allows us to do more complex tasks more easily. It does this by introducing layers of abstraction (tools or systems) between ourselves and what we are acting on. The term comes from the Greek concept of techne, which is often translated as art or craftsmanship. In this context, technologies are tools that helps us transform raw materials, giving them new meaning. As we learn how to use a tool and slowly become more adept with it, we internalize its implementation and it becomes an extension of us. Think of a carpenter and his hammer – as he grows more skilled, he forgets about the hammer itself and instead focuses solely on what he is trying to accomplish with it.

This closeness leads us to ignore the tool itself and makes us blind to the impact it has on us. This is fine when we’re dealing with a hammer – I’d have to stretch to ascribe it a philosophical position, but this is not always the case with increasingly complex tools [2]. Facebook has an implied view of what constitutes identity and Google’s pledge to “not be evil” takes an explicit moral stand. Views on data ownership and open vs. closed systems have far-reaching philosophical implications (You are not a Gadget!).  To be melodramatic: If we don’t analyze the values embedded in technology, we risk giving up control of our actions and losing our humanity.

I won’t spend much time here on why it’s necessary to create our own value system, but to me the appeal of Nietzsche’s Ubermensch, who sees personal value creation as the only solution to nihilism, [3] is self-evident. In an increasingly secular age, many (most?) people are not brought up with complete and coherent ethical systems, giving us the opportunity and responsibility to create them. For all the talk of the singularity, trans-humanism and human progress, the first and most basic task of the technologist is to create a value system that will support technological growth while preventing human extinction (I’ll cover more of this later when reviewing Nicolas Bostrom’s work).

But how do we do so? I believe the first step, as in seeking inner peace, is simply to pay attention to what we do.

As I’ve started to observe my own technology habits, what really frightens me is the almost unconscious way I’ll pull out my phone or bring up Facebook, reddit or Twitter. While I’m waiting for an excel sheet to calc or query to run, I’ll alt-tab over and enjoy a celebrity blog. This is evidence of the increasing efficiency of our technology – the amount of effort required to alleviate boredom is almost zero. This makes it far easier for my choices to become habits and quickly leads to something resembling addiction (Check out Paul Graham’s Acceleration of Addictiveness for more on this).

However, as I become more aware of the technology I use, I am in a much better position to reject aspects of it that I find distasteful. The question then becomes are these sites and apps bad for me? Am I slowly internalizing a desire for constant, superficial information or an unhealthy love of cats wearing bread?

Better than Faith Hilling?

Fortunately, as with meditation, as we get better at observing our actions, we get better at detaching ourselves from our actions and seeing from multiple perspectives. This allow us to better analyze new technologies as they enter and shape our lives. This is ground often mined by writers – Michael Pollan and the Omnivore’s “Dilemma”; the red-state/blue-state battle over Pick-ups and Prius. But food production and transportation are some of our oldest technologies – the new alternatives are easier to integrate into our historical moral framework. Creating a similar model for new technologies requires us to try to look at new things in the context of human evolution, which is much more difficult than accepting TechCrunch’s glorified PR release.

Teaching people how and why to develop this skill is of particular concern because, as more and more young people are pursuing careers in technology and start-ups, it’s important to encourage them to take control of their personal development. We are often presented with the conventional wisdom’s view of Silicon Valley and endless rehashes of it, but I rarely see any second-level analysis that approaches things from a different perspective. To that end, I want to start by looking at the philosophy and ethics underpinning:

•      Zuckerberg’s views of transparence and identity
•      Google’s “Don’t Be Evil”
•      Apple/Foxconn and cheap global supply chains
•      Peter Thiel’s views on Libertarianism and Education
•      Zynga, desire engines and respecting one’s customers
•      Reed Hastings and the Start-up of You
•      Start-up culture as currently proselytized by YC, Eric Ries and the SV-MSM (techcrunch et al.)
•      Apple products, closed systems and creativity

By looking at the these things, I hope to develop tools to reflect on my personal value system and the ongoing process that creates it. And hopefully other people will find something useful, or, at the very least, interesting.

[1] From Evegeny Morogov’s excellent review of Job’s biography

Rolling Stone: Let’s talk more about the Internet. Every month, it’s growing by leaps and bounds. How is this new communications web going to affect the way we live in the future?

Jobs: I don’t think it’s too good to talk about these kinds of things. You can open up any book and hear all about this kind of garbage.

Rolling Stone: I’m interested in hearing your ideas.

Jobs: I don’t think of the world that way. I’m a tool builder. That’s how I think of myself. I want to build really good tools that I know in my gut and my heart will be valuable. And then whatever happens is … you can’t really predict exactly what will happen, but you can feel the direction that we’re going. And that’s about as close as you can get. Then you just stand back and get out of the way, and these things take on a life of their own.

[2] This is a pretty quick hacky overview of Heidegger’s view of meaning and technology. Perhaps more to come later. For a review of techne and episteme, check here

[3] From Thus Spake Zarathustra:

 ”I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?

All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment…

Behold, I teach you the overman. The overman is the meaning of the earth.Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth! I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poison-mixers are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying and poisoned themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so let them go.

Once the sin against God was the greatest sin; but God died, and these sinners died with him. To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing, and to esteem the entrails of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth…

What is the greatest experience you can have? It is the hour of the great contempt. The hour when your happiness, too, arouses your disgust, and even your reason and your virtue.

The hour when you say, ‘What matters my happiness? It is poverty and filth and wretched contentment. But my happiness ought to justify existence itself.’

The hour when you say, ‘What matters my reason? Does it crave knowledge as the lion his food? It is poverty and filth and wretched contentment.’

The hour when you say, ‘What matters my virtue? As yet it has not made me rage. How weary I am of my good and my evil! All that is poverty and filth and wretched contentment.’

“Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman–a rope over an abyss…