Of Tools & Biases

Embedded in every tool is an ideological bias, a predisposition to construct the world as one thing rather than another, to value one thing over another, to amplify one sense or skill or attitude more loudly than another.

Neil Postman

So what’s the solution - to shed all tools, and go back to a pre-tool era? As if we could dig deep enough to end up there - and when we did, we would end up realizing we only got there by virtue of a digging tool, accidentally sneaking in this sacrilegious trojan horse of an instrument and its heretical taint of artifice into the garden of eden, desecrating Postman’s paradise. 

I’d rather embrace tools for their power to change us - we are the creature that can selectively wear idealogical biases like costumes for the masquerade, pragmatically or aesthetically or exploratatively dancing between “constructions” and “values” and “senses or skills or attitudes”. Choose and use your tools, and choose and use them wisely. 

What does that look like? “Repurposing” tools doesn’t hit the nail on the head - retooling our purposes, perhaps, inches nearer the mark.