Why does a cell phone have a screen? From televisions and cell phones to refrigerators, many contemporary technologies come with a screen. The article aims at answering this question by employing Emmanuel Levinas’ notions of the Other and the face. This article also engages with Don Ihde’s conceptualization of alterity relations, in which the technological acts as quasi-other with which we maintain relations. If technology is a quasi-other, then, I claim, the screen is the quasi-face. By exploring Levinas’ ontology, specifically (...) what can be identified as his tool analysis, as well as his notion of the face, a new understanding of contemporary technologies can be extracted. Some of these technologies hardly fit into the Heideggerian notion of the hand as the main interface to artifacts. Instead they require the face. Levinas’ notion of the face is analyzed from an ontological perspective and developed in conjunction with the screen. As the screen serves as a quasi-face, it enables the construction of quasi-other technological artifacts. (shrink)

As AI algorithms advance and produce surprising outputs, the question of imagination arises. Can we classify their output as imaginative? And what is their effect on human imagination? Apparently, algorithms follow Kant’s explanations on human imagination, thereby pushing us to update our understanding of imagination by taking into account the co-shaping between humans and their technologies. Such a new understating is offered in this article based on the theories of Don Ihde and Bernard Stiegler. With Ihde, imagination is conceived as (...) tightly linked to perception. Imagination evolves from the modernist task of seeking new points-of-view to a new mode in which technologies present imaginative layers of information on top of reality. With Stiegler, imagination is regarded as tightly linked to memory. He demonstrates how imagination complements memory, serves as a condition to memory/technology and at the same time how imagination itself is conditioned by memory/technology. In this article I develop a new synthesis: imagination as composed of perception and memory. This is the foundation of my layered model of digital imagination. In this model, the task of AI algorithms is the filling in of the layers with data. By producing endless possibilities, these technologies “automate” the Kantian “free play” of imagination, allowing us to examine more options and focus on the best of them. The model reserves the production of meaning to humans. Our role as humans is to generate meaning to the link between layers and establish new layers. (shrink)

This investigation provides an in-depth exploration of the dialectics of action and technology in the works of French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, both in terms of the concrete use contexts of technological artifacts and the entanglement between individual agents and their sociotechnical surroundings. Furthermore, it briefly outlines some potentials of Sartre’s thoughts for debates in contemporary philosophy of technology. Throughout his works, Sartre approaches human action from different yet dialectically interrelated perspectives that are always accompanied by and developed in relation to (...) reflections about technology. Against the background of a complementary conception of human action that is derived from Sartre’s major works, the implementation of matter in the course of action primarily represents an instrumentalization. Things are thus always disclosed as implement things due to the practical character of human existence. Although things do not prescribe action, the material characteristics and properties of these things render them more useful for attaining some and more adverse for attaining other ends. Despite the ontological freedom of human beings, their position in societal forms of organization, to which Sartre refers to as practical ensembles, delimits their choice of means and necessitates them to satisfy their needs and desires with the limited means available. In this way, la force des choses arises, not as a result of the characteristics of technology but as an outcome of sociality and politics. (shrink)

This article will discuss the ongoing development of a Marxist theory of international relations. Examining the work of Hannes Lacher and that of the contributors toMarxism and World Politicsreveals an overarching concern amongst this group of scholars to engage with the central concerns of the discipline of International Relations – the nature of the state, anarchy, and war. Their analysis provides an excellent starting point for the development of a Marxist approach to international relations.

Some fundamental biotechnologies hold unprecedented potential to eradicate many incurable diseases. However, in absence of regulations, the power of patent makes the future use of some important biotechnology in few institution’s hands. The excessive patents restrict researcher access to the fundamental technologies. It generates concerns and complaints of deteriorating the public health and social welfare. Furthermore, intellectual curiosities, funding, respect among colleagues etc., rather than patents, are the real motivations driving a major ground-breaking discoveries in biotechnology. These phenomena reveal that (...) some biotechnology patents are alienated from the purpose of patent system. Therefore, it is necessary to take some approaches to stop over-patenting these fundamental biotechnology inventions. This article proposes a model regulatory framework for controlling biotechnology patent alienating from the purpose of patent system. (shrink)

This article critically re-reads György Márkus’s seminal Marxism and Anthropology in light of its recent reissue with an introduction by Hans Joas and Axel Honneth. Joas and Honneth problematically identify the normative source of Márkus’s position as an a-historical and extra-natural account of the human. In fact, when the human essence is thought as natural while also historical, developing new powers and needs through changing strategies of socially organized work, Marx’s materialist conception of history can be used to generate a (...) critique of social organizations, relations, and structures that constrain rather than promote such development. Such constraint on developing powers can be read as ‘alienation’ from the human essence. Márkus’s work develops this reading of Marx in a textually sensitive way, but his analysis of alienation in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 focuses on the individual when such analysis could in fact be profitably extended to apply to groups and the species as whole. (shrink)

This article examines why Günther Anders, one of the 20th century’s most formidable critics of technology, deemed a critique of technology necessary at all. I argue that the radical philosophy of industrialism in Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (The Obsolescence of Human Beings) and related texts is a response to what Anders’s work presents as inadequacies of traditional Marxism, with its focus on class struggle and property relations. In effect, his critique of technology, which is more attentive to forms of domination (...) emergent with mechanization, would come to supplant classical Marxist thought. The piece concludes with some thoughts about how Anders’s ‘post-Marxist’ perspective provides insights for contemporary Marxism and, in turn, how the latter can throw light on problems in Anders’s philosophy of the machine. (shrink)

Amy Wendling contends in this book that Marx’s concern with alienation is not restricted to his early, more explicitly Hegelian writings, and that it can be seen to evolve throughout his work in tandem with his interest in technology. This evolution, according to Wendling, is marked by his transition between two successive scientific paradigms, both of which pertain to the status of labour and machinery within society. Wendling claims that Marx uses the distinction between them as a means of conducting (...) an immanent critique of capitalist ideology. Consequently, although it is primarily a work of intellectual history, this book offers an interesting contribution to the hermeneutics of Marx’sCapital. In addition, it also bears relation to contemporary discussions concerning real subsumption and the abolition of labour. The book’s general argument raises questions as to the degree to which a conception of alienation must rely upon notions of human essence, and upon an idea of a ‘natural’ and ‘authentic’ humanity. Wendling’s responses to those questions are described as problematic within this review, but they are also acknowledged to be both pertinent and intriguing. (shrink)

Digital innovations are rapidly changing the contemporary workplace. Big Tech companies marketing algorithmic management increasingly decide on the Future of Work. Political responses, however, often focus on managing the impact of these technologies on workers. They leave the question of how these technologies are designed or how workers can determine their own futures unanswered. This approach risks surrendering the Future of Work debate to techno-determinist imaginaries aligned with corporate interests. Using Cornelius Castoriadis’ early writings on worker struggles in French Tayloristic (...) factories and his later oeuvre on conflictual social imaginaries, I propose an agonistic approach to the Future of Work. Not merely companies implementing workplace technologies, but also workers themselves possess agency in determining the Future of Work. Workers’ frequent contestations against machinic surveillance and technologically mediated coordination of the labour process disclose an alternative Future of Work in which technologies are used to enhance worker autonomy rather than bureaucratic control. Worker struggles at Amazon Mechanical Turk illustrate this agonistic dynamic: Amazon mobilizes algorithmic management to fragment and control a workforce of globally dispersed remote workers, but the latter form online social communities and create counter-technologies to reappropriate control over the labour process. (shrink)

This article elucidates the neutrality of social media in the discourse of philosophy of technology. I prefer to Don Ihde’s postphenomenology and Andrew Feenberg’s critical theory of technology for opening discourse and criticizing the status of neutrality in social media. This article proves that social media cannot be neutral because there are internal contradictions in technocracy that view social media merely as an instrument. Through postphenomenology, social media becomes non-neutral because it has the relation intensionality between human and technology based (...) on four basic forms of technological mediation: embodiment relations, hermeneutic relations, alterity relations, and background relations. In another side, the critical theory of technology will be bringing discourse in instrumentalization theory, post-technological rationality, and technological democratization perspective. I conclude this article by describing social media users in Indonesia have to actualize in the democratization of the social media through active participation in the critical reasoning framework and sensitivity feeling in the public sphere. (shrink)

This study is an intervention in postcolonial theorising through a critique of technologies of representation. It examines the effects of technologically-mediated representation in a postcolonial condition that the Philippines has exemplified. New media technologies are mechanisms of representations that embody the logic of spectrality presented in Jacques Derrida’s later work. Spectrality, which brings doubts, ephemerality, and instability to dominant discourses and modes of representation, provides a chance for change.Spectres are effects of technologically-mediated representation that articulate the infinite demand for justice (...) under conditions of enduring inequality. As quasi-transcendental elements of deconstruction, spectres are not reducible to either human or technical intervention; they express the relation of humans to technologies, in which representation is central to the mediation of political authority. This technological representation is the condition of what Derrida calls “iteration,” or the transformation of hegemonic authority through the very repetition of its fundamental terms of identification. The examination of emancipatory new media technologies in a postcolonial condition is inspired by the work of Jacques Derrida, in his deconstructive reading of Marx’s spectres. However, the writings of Habermas and Adorno have offered an implicit appraisal of the ontology of spectres. Habermas’s theory of the public sphere and Adorno’s negative dialectics are discourses that unwittingly solicit spectres. The account of the postcolonial condition in the Philippines works through the questions of universality, subalternity, and the right to theory that are raised by the project of Western critical theory. (shrink)