Becoming in Service of Artifacts

The objects, they tell us what to do, it's encoded in them. The things we put out there, we become. They change us, our nature, the fates we produce and bring about. From McLuhan's Understanding Media:

"By continuously embracing technologies, we relate ourselves to them as servomechanisms. That is why we must, to use them all, serve these objects, these extensions of ourselves, as gods or minor religions. An Indian is the servomechanism of his canoe, as the cowboy of his horse or the executive of his clock. Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology. Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth." (p. 68-69)

Speaks to

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• Topic / Mediological Induction

• Topic / Aspects of Reality: Recursion