Beyond tech philes and phobes

(Photo credit: Gauthier V. (2023) ‘Ingéniosité paysanne’, https://flic.kr/p/2p4Lg9T (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED))

For centuries, even millennia — from the Lower Palaeolithic to around 1800 — technologies were things we made and owned and transmitted in our families and communities, things we shaped and which in turn shaped us. By holding and practising and passing on knowledge of technology, and by enacting technological practices with our bodies, we expressed and negotiated identity and meaning and agency and politics and culture.

Now all of that has been lost.

All that’s left to us are ‘products’ over which we have no choice but to acquiesce either enthusiastically or resignedly.

All that’s left is a tedious identity binary: phile or phobe.

Super-user or sceptic.

I’m not sure if this kind of polarisation is inevitable, given our millennial coevolution with technology. Instead, this polarisation seems to me to be a particularly 21st-century form of the divisiveness manufactured by the normal functioning of social media and populist politics. This polarisation, between philes and phobes, seems certain to produce outcomes that will be harmful to our futures, as the philes willingly yield to a kleptomaniacal AI capitalism which burns fossil fuel for laughs, while the phobes bury their heads in the sand.

Generative AI is degenerative by nature. Only we can make it regenerative. But not through slack-jawed buy-in, and certainly not by disengaging. Regenerative AI will rely on us developing and practising our knowledge of AI, and not in theory but in practice. We have to make it ours, play, experiment, tinker, put it to uses for good, for fairness, for community, for real wealth, for the environment.

Making AI regenerative is going to require that we are not prompt engineers but devious bricoleurs, in the sense intended by Claude Lévi-Strauss, working with our hands on this tool and recombining it with others to do things it was never intended for. For good. For our own good.

But first we need to escape the binary phile—phobe trap.

This post is accompanied by a black and white photo by Gauthier V, entitled ‘Ingéniosité paysanne’, from 2023, in which we see a greenhouse in a field, possibly an orchard, on a hillside near the small village of Le Monteil, Ardèchein, southeast France. The greenhouse is built from timber and covered in plastic sheeting, and the gardener has incorporated a fine casement window with six glazed window panes, presumably removed from a house. In front of the window, for security, or perhaps for decorative effect, or both, the gardener has attached a metal cooling grill removed from a refrigerator.