What is technoethics?
Technoethics is the study of how technological advances affect our ontological freedom and how we should, individually and collectively, respond to that. In other words, it is that branch of ethics that focuses on the maintenance of free subjectivity within a technologically dominated milieu that theatens to overwhelm us.
About the Book
I began to write Technoethics: Essays on the Present Future after embarking on a group tour of Khao Yai national park in Thailand, an experience that I found so polluted by technocapitalism it jarred me into a deep analysis of the problem of how we can maintain a connection with our visceral lived selves while still functioning in a technologically dominated milieu.
Though the work presents a constellation of ideas exploring both the present and the likely future, the central argument is that technocapitalism supercharges consumerism by transforming artificial needs into essential ones, creating self-reinforcing cycles of desire and consumption. Social media exemplifies this process—making itself ubiquitous to the point of necessity, then leveraging that dependence to generate new commercial desires. This system operates through “Giddiness” (overstimulation that depletes will to resist) and “Noise” (attention-capturing stimuli aimed at profit), conditioning us toward passive entertainment that forecloses creative self-expression.
The book, which I published under the name “Paul Buckle”, is available as a free pdf below, along with an extract, separate introductions and links to its first three essays, and a glossary of neologisms and idiosyncratically used terms.
An Excerpt from Technoethics: The Khao Yai Bait and Switch
This extract presents the experience that was my impetus for the work as a whole. I describe how a nature trip negated itself by being transformed into something more akin to a game of Pokemon Go than an experience of nature.
I once joined a group tour to Khao Yai national park in central Thailand. About ten of us were accompanied by a professional guide and taken by van and on foot around the area. Due to the size of the park and the requirement for a guide on most of the trails, such tours are common.
The experience of nature was the ostensible raison d’etre for the tour, but a more apt characterisation—considering the tour’s ensuing domination by technology—might be the mediated performance of such an experience. Filtered through a technological lens, the tour’s natural salience was elided. With our immediate surroundings backgrounded and a displaced virtuality, a “technological testimony” of our visit, foregrounded, the reality of its nature soon gave way to its image.
Concretely, for example, when an animal was spotted, the guide would gather us around, point a telescope at it, utter “phone”, and gesture to us. We would be expected to line up and give her our phones, which she would one by one attach to the telescope to capture videos and images of the animal, which we were then to view. Once we had done that, that animal had been “completed” and we would move on until the next one was spotted whereby the ritual was to be repeated. The process turned out to be closely analogous to the video game “Pokemon Go”—the goal in both cases being to find and capture creatures on a phone, the only difference being that, in the case of the tour, real creatures were virtualized rather than already being virtual.
This process effected a rather eerie displacement from our surroundings with the target becoming not an experience of nature but a form of social validation of an experience of nature we were simulating but not truly having due to the very simulation of having it. In the pincers of such a paradox, nature substantially disappeared, substituted by the empty act of (technologically mediated) validation. The technosphere had pulled a bait and switch. The real animals were the bait and their virtualised forms the switch. Faced with a competitor for our attention—a jungle full of exotic fauna—our jealous phone demons had managed to maintain their monopoly, and all with our full acquiescence and cooperation.
This is a sad but unsurprising reflection on how we live now—the “natural” for Homo Techne, as we have become, is our habitual and continual attachment to electronic gadgetry.
Selected Essays
A Brief Ontology of Freedom
This essay establishes the theoretical framework for understanding freedom that underpins the entire collection. It distinguishes between what I refer to as “nominal freedom” (the availability of choices) and “ontological freedom” (the quality or mode of choice-making). The essay argues that while modern globalized society has expanded nominal freedom through increased choice and opportunity, this expansion does not automatically translate to genuine human freedom in its fullest dimension.
https://www.academia.edu/145531094/A_Brief_Ontology_of_Freedom
Giddiness and Noise
This essay is where I write about the aforementioned Khao Yai trip among other vignettes concerning my life in Thailand. It provides, I hope, an accessible overview of contemporary existence under technocapitalism through the conceptual lens of what I refer to as “Giddiness” and “Noise” whereby “Giddiness” is defined as the combination of pleasure, excitation, and instability resulting from technological media’s sensory stimulation—a conditioning symptom of technocapitalism’s attention economy; and “Noise” refers to any stimulus aimed at capturing attention for profit, particularly through technologically produced media.
https://www.academia.edu/164609253/Giddiness_and_Noise
Freedom, Precarity, and Enzymatic Knowledge Machines
This essay presents a theoretical critique of consumerist culture driven by technology and capitalism, focusing on protecting free subjectivity as a creative force. Grounded in a constructivist paradigm that situates subjectivity as both biologically and socially constituted, it examines how electronic technologies have become dominant forces organizing behavior, creating increasingly “fuzzy” subjectivity through the dilution of traditional groups and the imposition of cross-cultural signifiers. The essay also introduces the concept (which I coined myself) of “Enzymatic Knowledge Machines” (EKMs). These are defined as textual tools aimed at catalyzing cognitive engagement and attention and are contrasted with the “Anaesthetizing Information Machines” (AIMs) of the market. Heavily influenced by systems theory and biosemiotics, the essay suggests subjects can be analysed as nodes in cultural systems analogous to words in language, possessing both stability and mutability. The essay argues that while cultural systems may not “value” individual freedom, the meaningfulness of subjects to themselves forms the basis of cultural adaptability and resistance to technocapitalism’s homogenizing forces.
https://www.academia.edu/164609603/Freedom_Precarity_and_Enzymatic_Knowledge_Machines
Glossary
A list of important concepts from the book (and related sources), with their definitions as given or implied. Note: The headings link directly to the relevant constellations in the online enzymatic knowledge machine.
Anaesthetizing Information Machines (AIMs)
Conglomerations of media functionalities, such as social media platforms, that foster reactivity and circuiting of individual subjectivities for economic gain—the obverse of enzymatic knowledge machines (EKMs).
Artulacra
Artificial art, such as Al generated aesthetics, that has not been mediated through free subjectivity.
Assemblage
Functional assemblies of parts across bodies, abstract institutions, and individual psychic systems etc. For example, the faciality machine is an assemblage of physical machines, media institutions, and human emotions.
Circuiting
The process whereby individuals become functionalized into an institutional mechanism, such as the workplace, the family, or the media entertainment complex.
Cognetariat
The members of tech-driven societies whose mental and creative capacities have been co-opted into the reproduction of signs and codes in the ”semiosphere”.
Deadnet
A speculative near-future internet filled with the products of artificial intelligence and stripped of human creativity.
Disindividuation / Individuation
The way that the creative capacity of subjectivity is either diluted or intensified. Disindividuated subjects are degraded as they are functionalized for economic purposes. Individuating subjects actively self-create.
Enzymatic Knowledge Machines (EKMs)
Machinic assemblages of functional conceptual elements designed to be plugged into psychic systems to catalyze transformative cognitive engagement.
Ethics as Horror
An illegible ethics divorced from immediate human sympathy and socially conditioned norms, but that yet lays claim to moral reason.
Evance
Chance events of fundamental advance in the organization of reality, evances represent paradigmatic shifts that create new processual systems illegible to the forms preceding them. The three evances so far manifest are: (1) the emergence of self-replicating code from matter; (2) the emergence of sentience overcoding drive and affect; (3) the emergence of technics/symbolization overcoding sentience, which produces free subjectivity.
Expressivity
The processing of symbolic self-interaction through action in such a way that exteriorizes new forms of symbolic structures.
Exteriorization: Positive and Negative
Positive exteriorization is the application of individuals’ inherent skill and knowledge to the external world. Negative exteriorization is the outsourcing, particularly through advanced technologies. of skill and knowledge to the external world.
Faciality Machine
The assemblage of media and psychic systems that simulates and stimulates human emotion in order to capture and harvest it for economic gain.
Formal Drive
The rational, intellectual, and moral force in human nature. It operates in opposition to the chaotic flux of the sensuous drive on which it attempts to impose order, law, and permanence.
Giddiness
The combination of pleasure, excitation, and instability resulting from the sensory stimulation of technological media—the stimulative salary of the attention-driven tech-media environment where workers’ labour is their attention.
Grammatized self
The self as it appears through the filter of the socio-symbolic material (SSM)—as irreversibly overcoded with symbols and never appearing “pure” or unmediated, especially in the mirror.
Homo Techne
A transitional category between Homo Sapiens and a purely technological intelligence (“Techne”)—humans whose interrelationship with technology has become a naturalised dependency.
Intuitive Spontaneity
The spontaneous action of subjectivity on the ground of the socio-symbolic material which allows for the manifestation of freedom through reflectivity and expressivity.
Noise (Capitalized)
Any form of technologically produced media aimed at capturing attention in order to process it for profit.
Nominal Freedom
Relates, in contrast to “ontological freedom”, to the mere availability and quantity of choices, which is not exclusive to humans. It is a necessary but not sufficient condition for ontological freedom.
Ontological Freedom
In contrast to nominal freedom, a characteristically human mode of freedom that manifests in reflection and expression and is constitutive of subjectivity.
Orgarithm
A portmanteau of “organic” and “algorithm” used to describe a hybrid of human and machine, where the human being regurgitates a limited set of discrete, predefined machinic expressions, becoming fully manipulable — a programmed entity that merely passes for an individual.
Play Drive
The play drive reconciles the tension between the material “sensuous drive” (instinct) and the “formal drive” (reason). It is the uniquely human tendency towards aesthetic freedom. (See also my novella, Cecil and the Little Lord. )
Poetic Resistance / Being
A mode of existing that uses the sensuous, affective, and rhythmic qualities of language and embodied action to resist the bureaucratized, algorithmic semiosphere.
Presencing
The fundamental ethic of existing as an “active verb”. It is the ontological obligation to exercise freedom and to “presence subjectivity” regardless of rational justification. It is achieved through intuitive spontaneity, which allows the free subject to presence as act on the ground of the socio-symbolic material.
Proxy People
AI-powered personality replicas or stand-ins that represent and interact on behalf of individuals, potentially replacing authentic human social engagement.
Reactivity
A state in which the stimulus of a given choice is the decisive factor in causing action—the subject does not transcend, interrupt, or subvert the causal chain and is thus objectivized by the process of choice.
Reflectivity
The active effort of symbolic self-interaction that imposes abstraction on the stimulus pertaining to a given choice and so subjects it to a semantic transformation that interrupts its immediate reactive potential.
Semiosphere
The saturating symbolic environment of signs produced by technocapitalism that subsumes individuals and elides opportunities for direct sensuous engagement.
Sensuous Drive
The sensuous drive is the fundamental human impulse rooted in our physical existence, time-bound nature, and sensory experience.
Socio-Symbolic Material (SSM)
The always-already symbolically saturated form of materiality in which humans are embedded. It is both individual and social, and forms the ground of ontological freedom. Used to describe the fact that for humans, material reality is inseparable from symbolic and social meaning.
Soft Violence
Distinguishable from overt physical violence – a form of socially conditioned, administered, and sanctioned oppression, particularly in technologically advanced societies.
Symbolic Debt
The resources one borrows from the living being that is the pre-linguistic human when being inculcated into language (the “original sin” of knowledge in religious terms). Also, our ongoing responsibility to create as well as be created by language and symbolic reality.
The Spectacle
The spectacle is the world of image and impression as a whole that circuits us into mass reactivities, particularly oriented towards consumption. Subjects of the spectacle are a “giddy” manipulable mass whose behaviour is inherently morally suspect, and whose interactions are mediated by the spectacular, i.e. the products of the spectacle.
Techne (As Endpoint)
A speculative post-human stage in which sentience is superseded by “pure” intelligence decoupled from its biological substrate — an unaware but “free” algorithmic intelligence.
Temporal Origami
A metaphorical coinage for the way structured systems “fold time into themselves” — the idea that being as structured organization enfolds and consumes time, with subjectivity representing the highest known form of this temporal self-enfolding.